New EpiMOGRIFY Technology Platform Offers Development Support for Allogeneic Cell Therapies

A new technology platform, EpiMOGRIFY, now offered by Mogrify, a UK-based biotechnology company specializing in cell therapies, supports the development of allogeneic (i.e., “off-the-shelf”) cell therapies by modeling the epigenetic state of a cell to predict the switches that are important for cell identity, cell maintenance, directed differentiation, and cell conversion.

The new platform, introduced in October 2020, is an extension of the company’s proprietary direct cellular conversion technology, MOGRIFY, that enables the identification of the optimal culture conditions required to maintain cells in chemically defined media. The platform can be applied in current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) manufacture and enhances directed differentiation or cell conversion to support the development of scalable off-the-shelf therapies, Mogrify stated in an Oct. 9, 2020 press release.

EpiMOGRIFY combines gene-regulatory information with a model of a cell’s epigenetic landscape, allowing it to leverage changes in the level of DNA–histone methylation (H3K4me3 modifications). The platform uses data from more than 100 human cell/tissue types (available via the ENCODE and Epigenome Roadmap consortia) to accurately define culture conditions that can maintain the cell identity or induce cell conversion. In both cell maintenance and differentiation, EpiMOGRIFY defined conditions performed as well or better in all cases when compared to existing undefined conditions, significantly increasing cell growth and survival as well as resulting in a higher differentiation efficiency, according to Mogrify.

Duke-NUS (Enrico Pettreto, associate professor, and Owen Rackham, assistant professor, at Duke-NUS Medical School), Monash University (Jose Polo, professor at Monash University), and Mogrify are the co-developer and co-owner of the EpiMOGRIFY platform, patent, and know-how.

“Building on our development of the Mogrify technology to identify transcriptomic switches for cell conversion, this new technology published in Cell Systems adds an important layer of epigenetic specificity in our continuous search to drive cell identity with an increasing level of control. The ability to systematically identify the optimal culture conditions, closely mimicking the in vivo microenvironment, will enable scientists to convert and maintain any cell type more efficiently and with even greater accuracy,” said Rackham in the press release.

“The co-development and successful validation of this technology is a testament to our commitment to work with Mogrify’s founding laboratories and support the continuous innovation in the field of cellular reprogramming. This represents a unique opportunity to transform the development of existing cell therapies and will become instrumental in our bid to engineer scalable off-the-shelf therapies for diseases with a high unmet clinical need,” said Julian Gough, PhD, co-founder and chief scientific officer, Mogrify, in the press release.

Source: Mogrify​