Sarepta Brand Guidelines: AntiVirals of Corvallis, a 2012 Rename & Elevidys

An Oregon lab that changed its name twice.

Sarepta did not begin in Cambridge. English Wikipedia says the company was incorporated on 1 January 1980 in Corvallis, Oregon, under the name AntiVirals Inc., and occupied several laboratory spaces in the town before opening a production laboratory there in February 2002. Shortly before going public it took the name AVI BioPharma, trading under the ticker AVII.

Its science was built on Morpholino oligomers, synthetic analogues of nucleic acids conceived by James Summerton and developed with Dwight Weller, first under the name NeuGene Antisense, Wikipedia says. Because these molecules can bind to a chosen stretch of RNA, they can block a message from being read or change how it is spliced. In its AVI years the company applied the chemistry to viruses: it made headlines in 2003 with work on SARS and the West Nile virus, and in 2009 it won a contract with the US Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, according to Wikipedia. It also ran human trials of a cancer vaccine called AVICINE.

The company moved more than once. In July 2009 it announced that its headquarters would leave Portland for Bothell, Washington, near Seattle, and the move was complete by October that year. In July 2012 AVI BioPharma became Sarepta Therapeutics, with the new ticker SRPT, and in the same year it moved again, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wikipedia reports that the chief executive at the time, Chris Garabedian, linked the move to the need to recruit expertise in rare diseases. The original Corvallis laboratory closed in 2016, and Doug Ingram, formerly of Allergan, became chief executive in June 2017.

Exon skipping, then gene therapy.

Sarepta’s first approved medicines came from the Morpholino chemistry it had carried since Oregon. They are aimed at Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic muscle-wasting condition caused by faults in the gene for the protein dystrophin. The drugs work by “exon skipping”: they steer the cell’s splicing machinery past a damaged section of the gene’s message. English Wikipedia lists eteplirsen, targeting exon 51, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2016; golodirsen, sold as Vyondys 53, approved in December 2019; and casimersen, sold as Amondys 45. Wikipedia also notes that the FDA first turned down a Sarepta Duchenne drug in 2019 and reversed its decision three months later.

The company then widened into gene therapy. In February 2019 it acquired five gene therapy candidates, including one for limb-girdle muscular dystrophy, Wikipedia says, and in the same year it signed a licensing agreement with Roche covering the development and sale of its Duchenne gene therapy outside the United States. In October 2021 it opened a Genetic Therapies Center of Excellence in Columbus, Ohio, building on research begun at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and in January 2023 it partnered with Catalent to manufacture the therapy.

That therapy is Elevidys (delandistrogene moxeparvovec-rokl), a one-dose treatment that uses an adeno-associated virus to deliver a gene for a shortened form of dystrophin, as the FDA describes it. It received accelerated approval on 22 June 2023 for children aged four and five who can walk, and an expanded approval on 20 June 2024, according to a timeline published by the trade title CGTLive. Today Sarepta’s website lists work in Duchenne and limb-girdle muscular dystrophy, facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy and myotonic dystrophy type 1, and science pages on siRNA, RNA and gene therapy.

How the category presents itself.

Cell and gene therapy companies sell something that is hard to picture. A treatment may be a patient’s own cells, collected, changed in a laboratory and returned as a single dose, or a gene carried into the body by a modified virus. With no tablet or pack to show, these companies build their imagery from a small, shared set of motifs.

The most common is the abstract double helix, often drawn in light against a dark ground, followed closely by glowing cells, strands and particles rendered in soft blues, violets and teals. Where the science is shown more literally, the pictures move to the laboratory: gloved hands holding cryobags and vials, technicians in gowns, and clean manufacturing suites with stainless steel and bright, even light. Manufacturing matters to the story, because many of these treatments are made one patient at a time.

The other half of the visual language is human. Because most of these therapies are aimed at rare and inherited diseases, the companies lean on portraits of patients and their families, photographed at home or outdoors rather than in clinics, and on first-person stories told in their own words. Treatment centres, patient-support programmes and the steps of the “patient journey” often get as much space on a website as the science itself.

The field also has its own calendar. Companies present data and court investors and clinicians at meetings such as the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT), the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting in December, where blood-disorder therapies are discussed, and the Cell & Gene Meeting on the Mesa, an industry gathering. Names in the sector can change through spin-offs, sales and rebrands, so the identity a company shows at one meeting may not be the one it uses a few years later.

A year of regulatory change.

2025 brought a run of regulatory actions around Elevidys. On 18 July 2025 the FDA announced that it had placed Sarepta’s investigational gene therapy trials for limb-girdle muscular dystrophy on clinical hold, revoked the company’s platform technology designation and asked it to stop all shipments of Elevidys voluntarily; the agency said the company refused that day. On 22 July Sarepta paused all US shipments, and on 28 July the FDA cleared a restart for patients who can walk, CGTLive reported. A label update on 14 November 2025 removed eligibility for patients who cannot walk and added a boxed warning about liver injury, the same publication reported in November 2025. Wikipedia adds that in July 2025 the company announced a restructuring that cut about 36 percent of its workforce.

On its own website Sarepta calls itself “a global biotechnology company on an urgent mission: to engineer precision genetic medicine for rare diseases,” and says it is working towards “the world’s largest gene therapy manufacturing capacity.” Those are the company’s claims. Its corporate pages are written in short, urgent lines — “Some say wait until tomorrow. We say tomorrow is too late”.

The company has traded as AntiVirals, AVI BioPharma and Sarepta, and the Morpholino chemistry runs through all three periods, from antiviral research to muscle disease.

For a design guide, Sarepta shows how a biotech brand can change its name, its city and its focus while its regulatory record stays in public view. Compare Roche, its partner for the Duchenne gene therapy outside the United States, and bluebird bio, another Massachusetts gene therapy name. For this guide we use deep indigo, pale lavender and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sarepta’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.