Approach to Autoimmune Disease
Generating immune medicines for patients with autoimmune diseaseFor over 50 years, drugs that induce non-specific immune suppression have been used to treat autoimmune disorders. These are associated with safety concerns for long term use in these chronic diseases. Targeted biologics have provided significant benefit for many patients. However, a significant number of patients do not have an adequate or a durable response and these drugs do not address the underlying cause of the disease.
Repertoire is developing tolerizing vaccines as a new class of programmable medicines for patients with autoimmune diseases. These vaccines have the potential to re-establish immune homeostasis, leading to durable disease remission in the absence of generalized immune suppression, thereby overcoming the limitations of today's medicines and transforming the lives of patients that have been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.
mRNA tolerizing vaccines
Our off-the-shelf mRNA tolerizing vaccines are comprised of disease-relevant, tissue-specific epitopes that have been discovered using our proprietary DECODE platform. These epitopes are encoded by mRNA and encapsulated in a proprietary lipid nanoparticle together with an mRNA-encoded immune modulator.
Powered by the DECODE platform, we are uniquely able to select disease-relevant epitopes shared across patients, including those that are presented on HLA Class II molecules — the key risk alleles for autoimmune diseases.
The epitopes in our tolerizing vaccines drive expansion of antigen-specific regulatory T cells and induce anergy of CD4+ T effector cells in the target tissue. Antigen-specific T regulatory cells induce bystander suppression and ultimately reestablish immune homeostasis, leading to durable disease remission without generalized immune suppression.
Our medicines provide targeted immune suppression to address the underlying cause of disease and have the potential to treat a range of autoimmune diseases. We are currently developing tolerizing vaccines for the treatment of multiple autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.
Our advantage
- DECODE uniquely discovers novel, presentable, shared and disease-relevant epitopes across any Class II HLA, thereby enabling development of therapies for many autoimmune diseases based on targeting epitopes that are presented on disease-associated Class II HLAs.
- Our DECODE-enabled mRNA tolerizing vaccines provide highly efficacious and selective therapies through expansion of multiple epitope-specific T regulatory cell populations that induce bystander tolerance and restore immune homeostasis.
- Our mRNA tolerizing vaccines provide scalable, off-the-shelf therapies.
- DECODE identifies the phenotype of T cells, enabling immune monitoring during clinical development, thereby potentially shortening the time to market.
With our DECODE platform, we have the ability to design and develop targeted immune medicines.
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