Gene Therapy Business Could Be Raised Multimillion Dollars

    Research and Markets recently released its “Global Gene Therapy Market Outlook 2018,” which predicts that the gene therapy business could be a multimillion dollar industry by the end of 2018, potentially reaching $500 million by 2020.

    REGENXBIO, the gene therapy company formed by the collaboration between FoxKiser and James M. Wilson, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, is setting its sights on this market having raised almost $139 million in an IPO on 9/17/2015.

    REGENXBIO is developing therapeutic applications of the adeno-associated virus platform technology created in collaboration with Dr. Wilson, who also is director of the gene therapy program at Penn. Since its founding, REGENXBIO has sponsored a number of collaborative research and development activities with Dr. Wilson’s lab and led business development activities relating to these resulting discoveries. Penn and REGENXBIO have encouraged and enabled the scientific and commercial development of advanced gene therapy across multiple indications with vectors discovered by Dr. Wilson.

    “The gene therapy work that Dr. Wilson has pursued at Penn over the last twenty years has catalyzed interest and new opportunities for AAV therapies to be used to benefit patients, many of whom currently have inadequate treatment options,” says J. Larry Jameson, M.D., Ph.D., dean of the Perelman School of Medicine and Executive VP, University of Pennsylvania for the Health System.

    “Commercial and investor interest in the field of AAV-mediated gene therapy and therapeutic treatment has increased dramatically over the past several years, driven, in part, by numerous clinical successes and recent IPO activity involving gene therapy companies,” adds John Swartley, Ph.D., executive director of the Penn Center for Innovation  “We believe this bodes very well for the future prospects of Dr. Wilson’s technology platform and R&D activities, and patients suffering from debilitating diseases that may benefit from the extraordinary therapeutic promise of these ground-breaking programs.”