Protective self-antibodies
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Identifying novel targets and therapeutics by evaluating convergent protective antibody responses in groups of resilient patients
IRAS ID
276167
Contact name
Jane Osbourn
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Alchemab Therapeutics
Duration of Study in the UK
5 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
The Alchemab technology is centred on the identification of auto-antibodies that are protective against disease and hence might themselves be developed as drugs or could lead to novel targets for drug discovery programmes. The patients of most interest to us, along with matched controls, are those with predisposition to a disease but unexpected protection/resilience. Such ‘Elite Controllers’ are hypothesised to show a protective immune response to convergent antigens (epitopes) with structurally distinct, yet convergent antibody responses (paratope). Protective ‘Self’ antibodies have been widely implicated in a range of conditions including breast cancer (Tabuchi et al., 2016), HIV (Setliff et al., 2018) malaria (Tan et al., 2016) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Maier et al., 2018).
REC name
South Central - Oxford C Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
19/SC/0637
Date of REC Opinion
9 Dec 2019
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion