Beverley Davidson is a scientific adviser to Axovant. She has...

Beverley Davidson is a scientific adviser to Axovant. She has worked for years on shrna research into Huntington's. These days I think she may be favouring a miRNA approach, like uniQure, but not everyone is giving up on shrna. This paper shows that a combination of stem cells and shrna is effective in a mouse model of the disease.

As Axovant is primarily focused on neurological diseases, it would make sense if they included Huntington's in the programs contracted to Benitec. However, Spark and Voyager are already pursuing a shrna treatment for this target and so to play catch-up would probably not be worthwhile unless we partnered with/or licensed IP from a team like the one above. Uni Cal Davis did similar work (different stem cells) years ago but, as far as I can tell it amounted to nothing - just like most research.

On a different topic, I see that CoH et al. have developed a novel and very cool vector for using shrna to treat HIV. The vector only releases its payload in the presence to the HIV virus. I doubt that our new target would be a return to HIV but this early research seems to avoid some of the problems associated with previous treatments. Would this be enough to entice us back into partnership with CoH?

Anticipated News: Don't you all know that there was a transcription error in the previous company statement? It should have read, Q1 2029.