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.