ABOUT THIS REOFFER PROSPECTUS
You should rely only on the information contained in this prospectus or in any accompanying prospectus supplement by us or on our behalf. We have not authorized any other person to provide you with different information. If anyone provides you with different or inconsistent information, you should not rely on it. We are not making an offer to sell these securities in any jurisdiction where the offer or sale is not permitted. You should assume the information appearing in this prospectus is accurate only as of the date on the front cover of this prospectus, regardless of the time of delivery of this prospectus or of any sale of the Shares. Our business, results of operations, financial condition, and prospects may have changed since that date.
“SANA,” the Sana logos, and other trade names, trademarks, or service marks of Sana appearing in this prospectus are the property of Sana. Other trade names, trademarks, or service marks appearing in this prospectus are the property of their respective holders. Solely for convenience, trade names, trademarks, and service marks referred to in this prospectus appear without the ®, ™ and SM symbols, but those references are not intended to indicate, in any way, that we will not assert, to the fullest extent under applicable law, our rights or that the applicable owner will not assert its rights, to these trade names, trademarks, and service marks.
Unless the context otherwise requires, the terms “Sana”, the “company,” “we,” “us,” and “our” in this prospectus refer to Sana Biotechnology, Inc. and its subsidiaries.
THE COMPANY
We were founded on the belief that engineered cells will be one of the most important transformations in medicine over the next several decades. The burden of diseases that can be addressed at their root cause through engineered cells is significant. We view engineered cells as having the potential to be as therapeutically disruptive as biologics to clinical practice. Our long-term aspirations are to be able to control or modify any gene in the body, to replace any cell that is damaged or missing, and to markedly improve access to cellular and gene-based medicines. We have brought together an experienced group of scientists, engineers, and company builders and combined them with the necessary technologies to move this vision forward. We are developing in vivo and ex vivo cell engineering platforms to revolutionize treatment across a broad array of therapeutic areas with unmet treatment needs, including oncology, diabetes, central nervous system, cardiovascular diseases, and genetic disorders, among others. While our current product candidates are all in preclinical development, our goal is to file multiple investigational new drug applications (INDs) both in 2022 and 2023.
The process of repairing and controlling genes in the body, referred to as gene therapy or in vivo cell engineering, requires in vivo delivery of a therapeutic payload and modification of the genome. Of these, we believe delivery of a therapeutic payload represents the greatest unmet need and is thus at the core of our strategic focus, with our ultimate goal being the delivery of any payload to any cell in a specific and repeatable way. Our initial effort is on cell-specific delivery and increasing the diversity and size of payloads. Using our fusogen technology, we have shown in preclinical studies that we can specifically target numerous cell surface receptors that, when combined with delivery vehicles to form fusosomes, allow cell-specific delivery across multiple different cell types. We have initially chosen to focus this technology on delivering payloads to T cells, hepatocytes, and hematopoietic stem cells.
Frequently in disease, cells are damaged or missing entirely, and an effective therapy needs to replace the entire cell, an approach referred to as cell therapy or ex vivo cell engineering. A successful therapeutic requires an ability to manufacture cells at scale that engraft, function, and have the necessary persistence in the body. Of these, long-term persistence related to overcoming immunologic rejection of another person’s cells has been the most challenging, which has led many to focus on autologous, or a patient’s own, cells as the therapeutic source. However, autologous therapies require a complex process of harvesting cells from the patients, manipulating them outside the body, and returning them to the patient. Products utilizing this approach have had to manage significant challenges such as scalability, product variability, product quality, cost, patient accessibility, and a limited number of cell types being amenable to this approach. Given these limitations, rather than utilizing autologous cells to overcome immune rejection, we have invested in creating hypoimmune cells that can “hide” from the patient’s immune system. We are striving to make therapies utilizing pluripotent stem cells with our hypoimmune genetic modifications as the starting material, which we then differentiate into a specific cell type, such as a pancreatic beta cell, before treating the patient. Additionally, for cell types for which effective differentiation protocols from a stem cell have not yet been developed, such as T cells, instead of starting from a pluripotent stem cell, we can utilize an allogeneic cell, differentiated cells sourced from a donor, as the starting material to which we then apply our hypoimmune genetic modifications.
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