PEGS Boston 2021 Recap Series

Decoding the Immune Response

In today’s RECAP: PEGS Boston 2021 series, we discuss the importance of tracking the immune response to therapies and treatments by highlighting Dr. Tovey’s amazing talk on gene therapeutic AAV vectors, and our protein sequencing technology efforts: NovorIg and EasyM.

Quantification of the Neutralizing Antibody Response to Recombinant AAV Vectors, Michael G. Tovey

In this talk, Dr. Tovey introduced the iLite® platform developed by Svar Life Science as a cell-based solution to measure neutralizing antibodies in response to adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors in gene therapy. Current AAV gene therapy faces a number of analytical challenges such as assessing product potency and testing AAV-related immunogenicity. With iLite® technology, Dr. Tovey’s company, Svar Life Science, aims to address these challenges. Dr. Tovey walked us through the molecular construction of the dual-cell system consisting of packaging and responsive cell lines.

Throughout his talk, Dr. Tovey elaborated on the methodology behind iLite. A packing cell line expresses a recombinant virus, and a serotype-specific cap gene recognized specifically by the reporter cell line stably transfected with a luciferase reporter-gene placed under the control of an AAV-responsive chimeric promoter. Dr. Tovey also showed us some exciting results demonstrating how the two cell lines integrate to accurately detect and quantify anti-AAV antibodies in patient serum to test for immunogenicity and potency.

Next Generation Protein Sequencing to Track the Immune Response

At Rapid Novor, our goal is to decode immunity through antibody protein sequencing. We believe the antibodies circulating in the blood can unlock great insights about individual immune responses. We use our REmAbⓇ sequencing technology to power EasyM™, our non-invasive and sensitive monitoring assay for patients with Multiple Myeloma. Another application of our protein sequencing technology is our NovorIg™ platform which can be used to characterize post-therapy immune response, including gene therapy.

NovorIg™ is a proteomics-based tool to characterize antibody response in real time. Knowing that immune responses are extremely complicated, assessment from different angles using different methods can be very beneficial. For example, it will be interesting to have NovorIg™ run in parallel with platforms like iLite® for cross validation and a comprehensive analysis of immune responses to better screen for the best AAV therapy.

Next in the PEGS Boston 2021 Recap Series…

Stay tuned, we’ll be talking about Structure Knowledge for better therapeutics next. Sign up for our Rapid Insights to get a recap of the whole series.