New technology makes clinical research more precise

12-13-2006: 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 between VIB and AlgoNomics 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. When you suspect that a certain substance has a therapeutic effect, it must not be destroyed by your immune system, or induce other immune responses, because you want the substance to be able to do its beneficial work. On the other hand, when developing a vaccine, you do want it to induce an immune response that is, a reaction that does not make you sick but that protects you against future contact with the disease that the vaccine combats.

For quite some time now, AlgoNomics has been offering a sophisticated computer program, Epibase®, to companies that are developing therapeutic proteins and that want to know whether their product induces an immune response. 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 which include T-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. Thanks to the collaboration between VIB and AlgoNomics, it is now possible to generate all the data by means of a single test a combination of 'in silico' and 'in vitro' work.