BlinkBio, Inc. Announces Issuance of U.S. Patent No. 9,931,407 Covering the Company’s Broadly Enabling SiLinker and Payload Cassette Technologies

Source:  BlinkBio, Inc. 4/25/18

Patent Establishes Strong Foundational Intellectual Property for BlinkBio’s Proprietary Candidates Advancing toward Clinical Testing

BlinkBio Inc., a privately held biotechnology company, today announced that the USPTO issued patent no. US 9,931,407 covering BlinkBio’s SiLinker and Payload Cassette technologies, primary components of the Company’s Tunable Drug Conjugate (TDC) Platform. TDCs represent an innovative approach to the development of differentiated Drug Conjugate therapies for the treatment of cancer and other diseases. The Company is rapidly advancing its preclinical pipeline based on this novel platform and expects to complete its first IND filing by mid-2019.

“We are delighted with the issuance of this key patent for technologies innovated internally by BlinkBio scientists,” stated Dr. Colin Goddard, Chairman and CEO of BlinkBio. “Our SiLinkers constitute a tunable, pH sensitive, linker technology that we can employ in TDCs to enable rapid and uniform release of potent toxins inside targeted tumors. Further, our Payload Cassette technology allows delivery of multiple payloads per TDC, enabling high concentrations of a cytotoxic agent within the tumor. Because of these and other key capabilities, we believe our TDC platform represents a highly competitive alternative to conventional Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs).”

Drug Conjugate therapies have become an increasingly important part of the therapeutic arsenal available to oncologists, using a targeting moiety to selectively deliver cytotoxins to cancer cells with the potential to improve safety and efficacy compared to traditional cytotoxic chemotherapy. BlinkBio’s next-generation TDCs utilize rapidly cleaving SiLinkers that can deliver multiple Conditionally Active Payloads (CAPs) (organized in Payload Cassettes) in order to concentrate high doses of toxin inside the targeted tumor, while largely protecting normal cells from toxicity. Since our TDCs are <1/15^th the size of conventional ADCs, they also can achieve better tumor penetration and more rapid clearance compared to ADCs. Furthermore, the tunability of the patented SiLinker system allows BlinkBio to make slowly cleaving drug conjugates as well, further expanding the technology to applications typically addressed by conventional ADC approaches.

About BlinkBio Inc.
BlinkBio is a privately held, biotechnology company based in Jupiter, FL, that is advancing Tunable Drug Conjugates (TDCs), a new class of drug conjugate therapies, for the treatment of cancer and other diseases. We have designed our TDCs around our broadly enabling, proprietary SiLinker and Payload Cassette technologies. Our lead therapeutic program targets the Folate Receptor alpha (FRα), a cell surface receptor that is highly overexpressed in a high proportion of ovarian, endometrial, and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Using a small molecule ligand, rapidly cleaving SiLinkers and Conditionally Active Payloads (CAPs) organized into Payload Cassettes, we have validated the performance of all elements of our TDC platform and are currently finalizing the selection of a development candidate in this program. We expect our first TDC to enter the clinic in mid-2019.