Ikarovec Limited
R&D
- Website
- https://ikarovec.com
- Membership category
- Emerging Y2
Innovation Centre, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7GJ, United Kingdom
Ikarovec Limited at a glance
Ikarovec is a UK-based gene therapy company with a therapeutic focus on treating unmet needs in chronic ophthalmic conditions.
About Ikarovec Limited
Ikarovec is a gene therapy company based on the Norwich Research Park (NRP) with a pipeline of novel, bi-cistronic AAV-based gene therapies to treat the unmet clinical needs of serious but common eye diseases including age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Around 600,000 people in the UK have sight loss caused by AMD and around 70,000 new cases are diagnosed each year.
Conventional therapies for AMD require repeat injections into the eye every few months, whereas gene therapies have the advantage of requiring a single eye injection on one occasion with therapeutic benefits lasting many years. Since it began in 2020 Ikarovec has built an experienced team, fully equipped the laboratory and established complex in-house in vivo ophthalmic disease model capabilities. This has rapidly and cost-effectively enabled the design, screening and selection of two novel bicistronic AAV-based vectors for the treatment of geographic atrophy (GA) and neovascular (wet-form) AMD.
Ikarovec’s most advanced programme is for GA which is an advanced form of AMD that can result in the progressive and irreversible destruction of retinal tissue leading to loss of vision over time. Ikarovec’s gene therapy is designed to slow the progression of the disease and protect the retinal cells from destruction.
