Date: 2013-11-04
Type of information:
phase:
Announcement:
Company: AIMM Therapeutics (The Netherlands)
Product:
Action mechanism:
Disease: vaccine against RSV
Therapeutic area: Infectious diseases
Country:
Trial details:
Latest
news: * On November 04, 2013, AIMM Therapeutics, a Dutch developer of a new generation of therapeutic antibodies, has announced that researchers have used the Company’s unique family of antibodies that neutralize respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to engineer an improved vaccine against RSV. In a paper published in Science titled ‘Structure-Based Design of a Fusion Glycoprotein Vaccine for Respiratory Syncytial Virus’, a team of scientists from the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases describe how structural biology insight into how AIMM’s highly potent RSV antibodies work enabled them to engineer a vaccine immunogen able to trigger a response 40 times higher than needed to neutralize RSV infection (Jason S. McLellan et al, Science 342, 592 (2013).On the surface of RSV, there is a protein simply known as F that facilitates fusion with human cells during the infection process. Earlier this year Science published an article titled ‘Structure of RSV fusion glycoprotein trimer bound to a prefusion-specific neutralizing antibody’ describing the unique ability of AIMM’s highly neutralizing antibodies to recognize a prefusion complex of the RSV-F protein. The research showed that by targeting the RSV-F protein while it was in the compact prefusion conformation, AIMM’s antibodies could halt the critical unfolding of this protein into the conformation required for viral entry into cells. Working with this insight, researchers were able to identify the critical structure that the RSV-F protein presents to the antibody. Immunizing mice with a stabilized form of this structure produced an extremely efficient immune response to the protein that resulted in protection against subsequent challenge with RSV.1
