07 May

Covid-19 therapy

SciCross partners with scientists from Uppsala University, KTH and SciLifeLab in developing Covid-19 treatments in immune suppressed individuals. The project is called “An adaptable therapeutic technology platform to treat SARS-CoV infections in immune suppressed individuals” and has received funding from SciLifeLab and Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (https://kaw.wallenberg.org/). SciCross focus will be on identifying parts in the SARS-CoV-2 genome that can elicit an immune response towards the virus. More details about the project will follow soon.

Structure of the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein, PDB:6VXX.
16 Nov

Stem cell-based model of the blood-brain barrier

A better understanding of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) is key for developing treatments for disease like MS and Alzheimer’s. In a collaboration with AstraZeneca, KTH, Karolinska Institute and University of Skövde  we recently published an article studying the use of human stem cells to generate in vitro models of the BBB. More specifically, we studied  the barrier properties and transcriptome of iPSC-derived models. Check out the full article published in Stem Cells (pubmed).

IMG_3014

16 Aug

Immunogenicity risk in Multiple Sclerosis, paper in JCI Insight

In a recent paper, published in Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight, we describe a number of factors that influence the risk of immunogenicity responses (anti drug antibodies, ADA) in Multiple Sclerosis patients treated with Interferon beta (IFN-β). We found that NOTCH2 expression on CD14+ cells and increased frequency of proinflammatory monocyte subsets can be used as baseline predictors of neutralizing ADA  (nADA) in MS patients treated with IFN-β. Further investigation of NOTCH2 showed that nADA development was driven by a proinflammatory environment that triggered activation of the NOTCH2 signaling pathway prior to first IFN-β administration.

Check out the full paper.

IMG_2827

02 May

Dual objective: de-immunization and protein function

In a collaboration with the University of Tübingen and Harvard Medical School we have published  a paper on how to reduce immunogenicity and at the same time keep protein stability/function. The approach is based on multi-objective combinatorial optimisation and was tested on the C2 domain of Factor VIII.  For the full paper, go to Population-specific design of de-immunized protein biotherapeutics.

03 Apr

1st ABIRISK Drug Immunogenicity Conference

On April 1 the 1st ABIRISK Drug Immunogenicity Conference was held in Innsbruck, Austria. There were many highly interesting talks at this meeting, ranging from regulatory perspective by Amy Rosenberg FDA to a mathematical framework for prediction of therapeutic drug immunogenicity by Pfizer. SciCross presented an overview of the ABIRISK database, work that is done in collaboration with the IMI eTRIKS consortia.

The ABIRISK yearly general assembly and workpackage-specific meetings were held in Innsbruck the days before the conference. Here SciCross presented a tool for integration and analysis of data generated in a range of assays focused immunogenicity assessment of biopharmaceuticals. Please feel free to contact us for further discussions on this topic.

10 Aug

SciCross at the European Congress of Immunology

SciCross has contributed to work that will be presented at the European Congress of Immunology 2015, held in Vienna. The titles are ‘Risk factors of anti-drug antibodies (ADA) occurrence in multiple sclerosis ‘ and ‘Antibodies against interferon beta and natalizumab in European multiple sclerosis patients’. This work has been conducted in the scope of the ABIRISK project.