New technology makes clinical research more precise

The Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) and AlgoNomics have joined forces to develop a technology that verifies whether certain proteins induce an immune response in humans.

The collaboration has yielded a biological test that supplements the current computer simulations. The additional data enable a more precise determination of the immune response. This knowledge is important for the development of new medicines because it indicates that a new therapeutic substance is ready to be tested on humans.

In the development of new therapeutic proteins, it is extremely important to know whether or not the proteins induce an immune response.

For quite some time now, AlgoNomics has been offering Epibase to companies that are developing therapeutic proteins and that want to know whether their product induces an immune response.

On the basis of a computer program, Epibase can predict whether or not a particular protein will trigger the activation of T-cells. The technology can do this for all proteins, whether they originate from humans or from another biological source, such as a virus or a cancer cell.

Its main feature is that it can also do this for proteins for which little or no experimental data are available. Other technologies require at least a minimum of data to predict whether a substance induces an immune response or not.

Upon the request of AlgoNomics, VIB scientists connected with Ghent University, under the direction of Johan Grooten, have designed a biological test that supplements the Epibase assessments with certain experimental data.

The test exposes blood cells to the proteins under study. If the proteins being investigated induce an immune response, the T-cells will become active and produce cytokines. In this new test, the activity of the T-cells is measured by determining the quantity of cytokines that are produced.

The new test allows scientists to examine a biological system to see whether a substance induces an immune response. For the step to a clinical phase (and thus tests on humans), the experimental and "in silico' data are both needed to assess the risk of inducing an immune response.

The collaboration between VIB and AlgoNomics has made it possible to generate all the data by means of a single test − a combination of "in silico' and "in vitro' work.