Technologies

IgA Antibodies

The advent of humanized monoclonal IgG antibodies has revolutionized the treatment of numerous diseases such as cancer, infectious diseases, inflammation and autoimmunity. Over one hundred clinical trials using this new class of drugs are under way, which represents more than 40% of the therapeutic molecules being currently developed. This was made possible by the recent progress in hybridoma technology that allows the production of large quantities of this type of immunoglobulins.
Imunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies feature unique properties making them good candidates as a new class of therapeutic antibodies. IgA is the major antibody isotype expressed in mucosal tissues and is considered to be crucial for the first line of defense against pathogen infections at these sites. However, the development of IgA antibodies has been of low interest due to technical difficulties encountered for their production.

InvivoGen Therapeutics is launching "IgA therapy" a new program which goal is to generate, using breakthrough technologies, IgA antibodies for an application as laboratory reagents and ultimately as therapeutic molecules.

The IgA therapy program is divided in two sub-programs:

production of humanized IgA using transgenic mice

production of therapeutic IgA using recombinant DNA technology

The goal is to obtain partially humanized IgA antibodies (the heavy chain) targeting various antigens, such as toll-like receptors and cytokines through the hybridoma technology using transgenic mice developed by the UMR-CNRS-6101 of Limoges. The resulting IgA antibodies will be commercialized as laboratory reagents and used to extract the sequences of the variable regions that recognize the antigen. These sequences will be exploited for the production of recombinant IgA antibodies.

Recombinant DNA technology offers the possibility to generate IgA antibodies entirely humanized. This technology which is frequently used for the production of commercial therapeutic IgG antibodies has been adapted for the production in mammalian cells of IgA antibodies. Mammalian cells are transfected with monogenic or bigenic plasmids carrying a gene encoding for the light chain and a gene encoding for the complementary heavy chain. The resulting IgA antibodies are purified from the supernatant by affinity chromatography. These IgA antibodies will be compared to the corresponding commercial therapeuticIgG antibodies to confirm their potential as human therapeutics.

Therapeutic program: inflammation