Empowered Patient Podcast Harnessing Biofactory Capability of B Cells to Deliver Therapeutic Proteins with Sean Ainsworth Immusoft
Sean Ainsworth, the CEO of Immusoft, is developing novel cell therapies by programming B cells to produce therapeutic proteins, including antibodies, enzymes, signaling proteins, and other protein types. This autologous cell therapy has shown promising results in early clinical trials for enzyme replacement therapies for rare lysosomal storage disorders. Some advantages of this approach are the ability to re-dose patients as necessary and to cross the blood-brain barrier. Initial findings are opening the door to other indications such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and obesity.
Sean explains, "We're developing B cells as modalities for therapeutic protein delivery. B cells have an exceptional ability to produce and release therapeutic proteins into the bloodstream. So naturally, they're producing and releasing antibodies, which are a type of protein. And so we're harnessing that biofactory capability of these B cells, programming them to manufacture our therapeutic protein. The idea is that once we've done that, we deliver the cells back to the patient. They naturally will go to the bone marrow and engraft, and once they've engrafted, they can live for many years, potentially decades. The two key things about the B cell are A, it's a natural biofactory, and B, they naturally engraft in the bone marrow."
"We got started with antibodies that we would programmed initially against HIV. So, it was a natural starting point for B cells, given that they produce antibodies. We were just coaxing them to produce very specific antibodies. And then the idea came about that if they can produce antibodies, we could probably enable them to produce other therapeutic protein types. So we began to experiment with enzymes, signaling proteins, and a number of different protein types. We found that under the right conditions, indeed, we could enable these B cells to produce a broad array of different protein types. But that ultimately means we have applications across a multitude of different therapeutic indications as well."
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