It is increasingly evident that a significant proportion of diseases is either directly caused or exacerbated by imbalances in the immune system. Specific diseases are linked to an overactivity or an insufficiency in a specific immune mechanism, leading to characteristic connections of a type of disease with a type of immune response. A highly reactive immune system efficiently protects from infection and cancer, yet at an increased risk of developing an autoimmune or autoinflammatory disease. Human health and wellbeing are therefore connected to a finely tuned immune response that finds the middle ground.
THE CHALLENGE
In a world of continuously developing pathogens and an environment that we ourselves are rapidly changing, we need to support our immune system to (re-)gain balance and maintain the optimum. To tap into the full potential of therapeutic immune modulation, we need drugs to boost or dampen many different types of immune responses in various immune cell types and in both arms of the immune system. For example, for cancer immunotherapy, drugs are currently available only for one type of adaptive immune response, cytotoxic T-cells. Evidently, when steering immune responses, more is not always better, yet it is challenging to develop and apply drugs that can hit the sweet spot in most patients.
OUR SOLUTION
Truly evaluating the therapeutic potential of any immune mechanism is difficult until drugs exist that boost or dampen its activity. At EMUNO, we functionally screen for substances that modulate specific activities of different immune cells. To this end, we develop tailored close-to-nature screening approaches for each individual immune mechanism that allow us to evaluate the desired net effect on the whole pathway. We believe that this leads to superior and unique results as compared to conventional screening approaches that require to predefine the mode-of-action of the drug, unnecessarily limiting the potential hits. The unique hits we acquire with this open-minded development strategy are optimized and evaluated for their potential to treat disease and promote health.