Phagemer verification

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

There is an unmet need for disease specific, safe and efficacious therapy in many diseases within all the four major disease areas autoimmunity, chronic infection and inflammation, as well as in cancer. Main hurdles involve severe limitations in knowledge of disease mechanism, specific targets, and the lack of a technology that can provide this information. Nextera has developed a unique phage display platform that we believe may alleviate this constrain in many cases and thus open the avenue to improved diagnosis and therapy. Our approach builds on ability to use the bodys' own war command central - namely the helper T cells - to combat disease as an entry portal to decipher relevant immune responses in a HT manner where the disease-associated T cell themselves are used as the central component. The T cell acquires its unique immune properties by virtue of decoding the major histocompatibility molecules that display a plethora of peptides to the immune system which it may react to if appropriate. In autoimmunity, the T cells engage inappropriate by getting activated by self peptides, whereas in cancer, the T cells are shut off by tolerance induction partly by the tumor environment, partly by lack of cancer defining peptides. In many cases, it is unknown what these T cells actually react to, but having this knowledge would have given insight into the underlying disease cause and drivers, as well as disclosed novel therapeutic targets. By using our unique Phagemer technology we have the ability to disclose these reactivities using the T cells them selves as bait and selecting massive peptide libraries displayed on phage in the context of MHC class II. This project aims at assessing this ability within a chronic inflammatory disorder and also to understand the epitope breath of clinically validated cancer targets.