Flagship seeds Sigilon with $23.5mm to develop Type I diabetes therapy

Flagship Pioneering launched Sigilon Therapeutics Inc. and seeded the company with $23.5mm. The start-up, armed with the research of its co-founders Daniel Anderson, PhD, and Robert Langer (both from MIT), is using an alginate-based polymeric capsule to encapsulate allogeneic cells that have been engineered into insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells. The company believes that its technology will avoid tissue scarring and immune responses that would other destroy implanted cells before they can be effective as a treatment for Type I diabetes.