Sangamo sheds staff once again in another retreat

Sangamo Therapeutics has announced another wave of job losses and a plan to license out two lead clinical programmes as it tries to reinvent itself as a neurology-focused genomic medicine specialist.

The latest cuts involve more than 160 staff – equivalent to 40% of its workforce – and follows a 27% cull claiming around 120 roles earlier this year. The aim is to roughly halve operating costs from an expected level of $240-$260 million this year, said chief executive Sandy Macrae.

The cutbacks come after Novartis and Biogen both backed away from partnerships focused on Sangamo's zinc finger gene-editing technology, a stalled initial public offering, and a decision to end the development of a gene therapy for sickle cell disease (SCD).

The plan now is to focus on epigenetic regulation therapies treating neurological diseases and novel adeno-associated virus (AAV) capsid delivery technologies – the latter recently attracting a $1 billion-plus collaboration with Eli Lilly’s Prevail Therapeutics.

That means another gene therapy for Fabry disease in a phase 1/2 clinical trial and CAR-Treg cell therapy programmes headed by a candidate for kidney transplant rejection in early-stage human testing will be shelved.

“We plan to do everything in our power to get these important assets into the hands of parties with the means to advance them towards patients,” commented Macrae.

The restructuring also means that its headquarters in Brisbane, California, will be shut down, and various senior executives will leave the company, including chief operating officer Mark McClung and chief scientific officer Jason Fontenot.

Both those roles will come to an end in the New Year and be eliminated, and Sangamo is rearranging its senior management by promoting head of neuroscience Amy Pooler to the role of head of research and genome engineering lead Gregory Davis to head of technology. McClung will be responsible for finding partners for the Fabry and CAR-Treg programmes.

Sangamo’s pipeline is now led by a recently unveiled programme focused on the sodium ion channel Nav1.7, which is still in preclinical development and is being tested as a potential therapy for neuropathic pain. An application to start clinical trials is due early next year.

The company is still plugging away with zinc finger-based therapies, which have fallen behind rival gene-editing technologies like CRISPR, presenting new data for programmes in areas like autism spectrum disorder and Phelan-McDermid syndrome, a genetic disorder that leads to intellectual disability.