Selecta Biosciences: from America with love
Will nanoraketa save everyone from cigarettes and diabetes?
They are poring over medications against nicotine addiction, melanoma, malaria, hepatitis B and type I diabetes. Vaccines will not appear in pharmacies soon, but the concepts of three drugs have already been sold for a billion dollars.
How is it treated?Classic vaccines are a mixture of an antigen and an adjuvant.
An antigen is most often a protein or polysaccharide, part of bacterial cells, viruses or other microorganisms. After vaccination, the body learns to resist the antigen. The adjuvant gives a signal to the immune system to activate, pushes it to action. As a rule, it is highly toxic. The vaccine should get into antigen-presenting cells located mainly in the lymph nodes. However, usually the drug circulates and is evenly distributed throughout the body, a significant part of it is wasted.
Selecta researchers have come up with special nanoparticles, a kind of launch vehicles for targeted delivery of antigen and adjuvant. The material for nanoparticles is polylactonic acid, a biodegradable polymer that is used to spray on the surface of wounds so that they heal more quickly, as well as to create threads that stitch surgical wounds. Other components of nanoparticles are also not something extraordinary and are commercially available.
Nanoraketa carrier in the sectionNanoparticles with the vaccine almost completely enter the lymph nodes.
In addition, the nanorack carrier carries a special T-helper peptide that enhances the effect of the adjuvant. The level of activation becomes ten times higher than with classical vaccine technology. Sometimes the difference reaches a hundred or more times. And the vaccine is not manufactured for the usual 3-4 months, but only 11 hours. Perhaps in the future this will reduce the cost of the drug.
Who treats?Selecta Biosciences was founded in Boston in 2007 by three scientists: Robert Langer, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the author of more than a thousand patents and the founder of more than three dozen companies, Omir Farokzad, a specialist in nanotechnology, and Ulrich von Adrian, a professor at Harvard University, who made several discoveries in the field of immune cell migration and immunotherapy methods.
In total, the company has about fifty employees. At the moment, the firm has attracted investment commitments of about $80 million, including $25 million from our region, from RUSNANO.
Interest from the state corporation two years ago led to the opening of a subsidiary company Selecta in Russia. Its CEO was Werner Kotrils, who headed Solvay Pharma until Abbot bought it for €4.5 billion.
The laboratories of LLC Selecta (RUS) have settled in the Himrar High Technology center near Moscow. So far they occupy only two rooms. Here nanoparticles are synthesized and tested for compliance with medical standards. Dynamic light scattering allows you to control the size of the particles, as well as their surface characteristics. Liquid chromatography helps to check the composition of drugs, the ratio of components, the degree of their purity and connectivity with each other.
Selecta (RUS) has 12 employees, more than half of them are scientists: synthetic chemists, analytical chemists, biologists. Some Russians were lured from abroad: the head of the chemical synthesis laboratory, Alexey Nizovtsev, used to work at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and one of the biologists was in North Carolina.
What is being treated for?Among Selecta's developments, the anti-nicotine vaccine for smokers who have decided to quit a bad habit is closest to the market.
The drug has already passed the first phase of clinical trials in Belgium. Recently, an application was submitted for the second phase of clinical trials in our country. The Ministry of Industry and Trade of Russia has allocated about 150 million rubles for the creation of a vaccine under a state contract. Perhaps the drug will appear in pharmacies in about five years.
– Nicotine enters the bloodstream within seven seconds after smoking. It easily penetrates the blood–brain barrier, enters the brain, reaches the pleasure center, promotes euphoria, – says Dmitry Ovchinnikov, Director of Research and Development of Selecta (RUS). - You can reduce the dose of nicotine, use chewing gum and patches. But this is too long and not too effective. You can also inject a drug that blocks the nicotine-sensitive receptor. However, it has a bad effect on the cardiovascular system and increases the risk of suicide: the patient loses the feeling of happiness, depression develops. We want to block nicotine itself. After vaccination, antibodies to nicotine are formed in the blood. Nicotine bound by the antibody can no longer penetrate the blood-brain barrier. There is no positive feedback, and the habit is quickly destroyed. A similar drug is used to treat alcohol and heroin addiction. Of course, we are aware that there is no pharmacological panacea against smoking. Therapy should be comprehensive. And the price of cigarettes should rise.
Selecta studies not only preventive, but also therapeutic vaccines that allow activating the cytotoxic response. The primary goal is to fight chronic infections and tumors, including hepatitis B and melanoma.
Another direction is toleragenic vaccines. They are aimed at suppressing the immunological response. There is a large group of diseases where the activation of the immune system has a pathological effect, primarily allergies, autoimmune diseases, reactions against transplants, as well as reactions against biologically active compounds used as drugs. First of all, Selecta is working on vaccines against orphan, that is, rare diseases (in Russia, such are considered ailments with a prevalence of no more than 10 cases per 100,000 people) and type I diabetes mellitus.
Type I diabetes is a disease in which the cells of the pancreas that produce insulin are destroyed. Unlike type II diabetes, this ailment mainly affects children, adolescents and adults under 30 years of age. According to Natalia Bastrikova, Director of Selekt (RUS) for development and Clinical Research, their company is provided with scientific and financial support by the American Association for the Study of Juvenile Diabetes. The exact causes of type I diabetes are still unknown to science, but this does not prevent the testing of appropriate vaccines.
Research in the field of toleragenic vaccines has attracted the interest of a large pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi. In 2012, it acquired the concepts of three drugs from Selecta, and even at the stages of preclinical animal testing. The total amount of the transaction amounted to about a billion dollars, it ranked eighth in the world among research and development transactions. The money will be received as certain results are achieved. The amount looks grandiose, but the global vaccine market is already $25 billion. According to Selecta estimates, it will grow by 15% per year. It seems that in the era of victorious capitalism, medicine is becoming an increasingly profitable business, because no one else trades time.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru16.09.2013