Disease Treatment Challenge
Pathogenic antibodies cause a diverse set of autoimmune diseases, such as myasthenia gravis, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy and immune thrombocytopenia, and allergic diseases such as food allergies, chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps,and chronic spontaneous urticaria. Our Ig sculpting enzymes are designed to selectively modify, reduce or eliminate pathogenic antibodies and are optimized as therapeutics via our IMPACT platform.
Lead Drug Programs
Our lead IgSc program, S-1117 is a novel engineered pan-IgG protease suitable for the treatment of acute and chronic autoantibody mediated diseases. This protease addresses multiple pathogenic mechanisms in a single drug, lowering IgG and immune complex levels, reduces antibody effector functions such as complement fixation, and cleaves the antigen receptor on self-reactive memory B cells, thereby modulating Ig-mediated autoimmunity and inflammation. Utilizing the IMPACT platform we generated novel pan-IgG proteases with reduced B and T cell immunogenicity and chemical liabilities while maintaining enzyme activity and stability.
Our (IgE) protease therapeutic, S-8484, was designed using the latest advancements in structure-augmented machine learning. It directly degrades serum IgE antibody and cleaves IgE expressed on B cells therefore targeting multiple mechanisms of humoral immune dysfunction in allergic diseases to induce rapid and sustained reduction in IgE. The IMPACT platform was used to imbue S-8484 with high potency and selectivity for IgE, and like S-1117, was used to reduce B and T cell immunogenicity and chemical liabilities while maintaining enzyme activity and stability.
Broad Pipeline Opportunities
We continue to apply our insights to design additional Ig sculpting enzymes that are selective for IgG subclasses and other Ig isotypes.
