Circio Holding ASA (”Circio” or ”the Company”) announced, on the 16th of July 2026, a research collaboration with Avenue Biosciences, a transatlantic protein engineering company, to combine their technologies to improve long-term expression of secreted proteins for the treatment of genetic and chronic diseases. Avenue Biosciences will deploy its machine learning-powered platform, which screens thousands of signal peptide variants, to identify sequences that improve secretion of therapeutic proteins expressed by circVec, with initial screening performed by Avenue Biosciences followed by in vitro and in vivo testing by Circio. No financial terms are disclosed.
Analyst Group’s View on the Avenue Biosciences Collaboration
The collaboration expands into a different layer of Circio’s partnerships to date. Circio’s existing external collaborations, focused primarily on targeted delivery spanning capsids (AaviGen, GenAssist), LNP formulations (United Immunity, Acuitas), and peptide amphiphile carriers (TraffikGene), while circVec governs how much protein is produced and for how long. Signal peptides govern a further and important step: whether a protein is efficiently exported from the cell once made. For secreted payloads such as antibodies, this is a distinct bottleneck: insufficient secretion can limit active protein reaching its target regardless of intracellular output. The two technologies are complementary, and the combination could increase functional secreted protein per vector dose, a parameter directly relevant to dosing and manufacturing cost in AAV gene therapy and beyond, for example in vivo antibody therapy.
Strategically, the announcement is most notable for extending Circio’s external testing into a new dimension: payload engineering, rather than delivery. It is the first of Circio’s 2026 collaborations to target the secretory step rather than tissue or cell targeting, consistent with the Company’s stated strategy of broadly testing circVec across tissues, delivery formats, and payload types. The collaboration is at an early in vitro screening stage with no financial terms disclosed, factors that temper its near-term significance.
In summary, Analyst Group views the Avenue Biosciences collaboration as an important extension of Circio’s 2026 partnership activity that adds a payload-focused complement to the Company’s delivery-side collaborations. Given the early stage of the collaboration and the absence of disclosed terms, Analyst Group assesses the near-term financial materiality as limited, while noting the collaboration as a further data point supporting circVec’s positioning as a broadly applicable expression platform.
