NOVANTINH: An Innovative Project for the Treatment of Respiratory Infections

BIOTEM participates as an expert in the development of monoclonal antibodies, in an innovative project within a consortium including 4 other prestigious scientific partners.
The project consists in trying to understand the mechanisms underlying the protective action of therapeutic antibodies intended to be administered through the respiratory tract, these antibodies being directed against some antigens of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa*.

The goal is to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms associated with a pulmonary vaccine-like effect and to exploit the host immune response to induce the spread of the target epitope of the therapeutic antibodies and enhance long-term protection.

– First step: Study of the molecular and cellular mechanisms supporting the vaccine-like effect induced by therapeutic antibodies on sentinel cells.
– Second step : Optimization of the vaccine-like effect induced by the antibodies (in the context of an administration through the respiratory tract) by engineering them.

More precisely for BIOTEM, with the help of the other partners of the consortium; our scientific and technical team has the mission to generate various candidate antibodies against selected epitopes in a family of target proteins (family not mentioned here), to privilege a large diversity of antibodies, in particular against weakly immunogenic infectious epitopes, and to optimize the skeletons of the antibodies, including by isotype switching and/or by producing variants with adapted effector regions.

(*) : also known as pyocyanin bacillus, blue pus bacillus or pyo; it is a gram-negative bacterium of the genus Pseudomonas. (source: Wikipedia).