Novel engineered cytokines for human therapy

Cytokines are biomolecules of great potential interest for human therapy.

They modulate the immune system and play an important role in cancer, inflammation, immune response and tissue regeneration. Despite their great potential, there are only a handful of cytokines approved for therapeutic purposes.

This is because many of them can have adverse side effects as they usually target different cell types, which adds to their low serum half-life, high production costs, or lack of physiological efficacy. Different methods have been proposed to improve the pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics of selected cytokines.

However, other properties do also need improvement, such as achieving effective local concentration at the target site; promoting the right activity in cytokines with dual functionality and decreasing toxicity by removing binding to unwanted cell types.

To help solving these issues, we have developed a new protein design strategy that can be applied to all helix-bundle cytokines, many of which have been shown to be therapeutically relevant. The resulting products are uniquely modified cytokines with improved properties.

Amongst such properties, our products show increase stability, higher affinity and specificity for their target receptors and should have reduced toxicity, all of which translate into greater safety and efficacy.

We have initial evidence both (in vitro and in vivo) of the superiority of our designs over conventional cytokines, and in this project we will fully validate our technological platform and advance in the development of a business plan following the advice of several venture capital and pharma companies contacted to date, with the idea of laying the basis for the creation of a new start-up company.