Circio Holding ASA (”Circio” or ”the Company”) announced, on the 26th of March 2026, that the Company has entered a research collaboration with United Immunity Co., Ltd. (”United Immunity”), a Tokyo-based biotechnology company, to evaluate circVec in the context of in vivo CAR-Macrophage (CAR-M) therapy. Under the collaboration, United Immunity will test whether its proprietary P-LNP delivery platform can deliver circVec to myeloid immune cells, specifically macrophages and dendritic cells, with the aim of establishing a joint platform for in vivo CAR-M applications in cancer, fibrosis, and autoimmune disorders. No financial terms have been disclosed.
Analyst Group’s View on the United Immunity Collaboration
The scientific rationale for the collaboration is straightforward. Developing effective in vivo CAR-M therapy requires solving two distinct problems: first, getting the genetic payload into the right cell, in this case macrophages, rather than accumulating in the liver as conventional delivery systems tend to do; and second, keeping the payload active inside the cell for long enough to have a therapeutic effect. United Immunity’s P-LNP technology addresses the first problem, as it is specifically designed to seek out and deliver its payload directly to myeloid immune cells, the family of immune cells that includes macrophages and dendritic cells, wherever they are located in the body. circVec addresses the second: in preclinical studies, circVec has demonstrated expression duration of more than six months in immune tissue on a single dose, with no detectable liver expression, compared to only a few days for conventional mRNA-based approaches. Neither technology alone solves both problems, but together they could. Whether the P-LNP system can deliver circVec’s DNA-based payload to myeloid cells at sufficient efficiency remains to be demonstrated, which is precisely what this collaboration is designed to test.
The announcement is also a strategically coherent addition to Circio’s partnership portfolio, extending circVec’s in vivo cell therapy footprint into an immune-cell class not previously addressed by the Company’s delivery collaborations, and is consistent with Circio’s stated objective of entering two to three new R&D technology collaborations in 2026. United Immunity holds a granted fundamental patent on its P-LNP formulation and is backed by institutional investors such as University of Tokyo Edge Capital, which lends credibility to the engagement. The absence of disclosed financial terms is a point of uncertainty that Analyst Group will monitor.
CAR-M remains a longer-term optionality layer, as Circio’s primary near-term value inflection points for 2026 remain the AAV-circVec disease-model readouts in heart and eye, the CNS results from the ongoing big pharma feasibility study, and the in vivo CAR T-cell targeted delivery data expected in Q2-26. Nevertheless, the partnership adds credibility to the circVec platform and reflects a broader trend of increasing interest from institutional and pharmaceutical players in in vivo cell therapy, a field that has already attracted several high-profile transactions during the last year, including AbbVie’s acquisition of Capstan Therapeutics for approx. USD 2.1bn and BMS’s acquisition of Orbital Therapeutics for approx. USD 1.5bn, both at a preclinical stage.
In summary, Analyst Group views the United Immunity collaboration as a meaningful and technically well-founded addition to Circio’s in vivo cell therapy portfolio. The two technologies address complementary bottlenecks, United Immunity solving the delivery problem, circVec the expression problem, and together could form the basis of a differentiated CAR-M platform. While no financial terms have been disclosed and the CAR-M space remains at an early preclinical stage, Analyst Group regards the collaboration as a longer-term optionality layer that incrementally strengthens circVec’s long-term licensing attractiveness, particularly in light of large pharmaceutical players committing multi-billion dollar capital to the in vivo cell therapy field.
