Products In Development

Overview

Autoimmunity as a Therapeutic Area

The diversity of potential targets and therapeutic modulators that will emerge from the VLST discovery platform provides the potential to treat a number of possible clinical indications. These include different autoimmune and inflammatory disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and multiple sclerosis, and conditions known to have an immune or inflammatory component to their etiology, such as the complications of acute viral infections, transplant rejection and asthma.

Autoimmune diseases result from dysfunction of the immune system in which the body attacks its own organs, tissues, and cells by way of antibodies and immune cells. More than 80 clinically distinct autoimmune diseases have been identified. Several of these diseases are well known, including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and systemic lupus erythematosus. Other autoimmune diseases are less familiar, such as idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, myasthenia gravis, and blistering skin disease. Collectively, these autoimmune diseases afflict 5-8 % of the population of the USA, i.e., approximately 14 to 22 million people.

Over 450 putative virulence genes have been identified by VLST and one or more binding partners identified for over 70 virulence genes. Five programs have been selected to move forward into therapeutic design and preclinical development.

A wide variety of in vitro assays to assess the immunomodulatory potential of lead therapeutic candidates has been developed. Validation of immunomodulatory activity in these human in vitro assays will allow for prioritization of the most promising therapeutic candidates for in vivo evaluation.

In vivo studies designed to evaluate the efficacy of our potential therapeutic candidates in inflammatory and autoimmune diseases are also underway. The studies will address increasingly complex questions relevant to eventual testing in the human clinical setting. These include: development of bioassays for potency and biomarkers for monitoring therapy; evaluation of the bio availability of our therapeutic candidate, testing to evaluate the ability of our candidate to modulate acute inflammatory processes and determination of the ability of our candidates to modulate complex, chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.