Research & Development
Complementary Research & Development areas of expertise in immunology
Accelerating target identification, product validation and beyond
Delivering first-in-class therapies activating and regulating the immune system
OSE Immunotherapeutics’ integrated Research & Development engine focuses on developing innovative immunotherapies for immune regulation in the fields of immuno-oncology and autoimmune diseases. It is based on three areas of expertise in immunology:
Immuno-Oncology: focused on myeloid targets, Auto-Immunity & Inflammation, T-cell-based vaccination.
Building on unparalleled experience in clinical immunology initially applied to transplantion, OSE’s research benefits from a fully translational platform fully intertwined with academic centers with complementary expertise in immunotherapy (INSERM, Center for Research in Transplantation and Immunology, University Hospital of Nantes, etc.).
Leveraging these collaborations and in-house expertise on novel target discovery, OSE’s team identifies innovative agonists or antagonists of the immune response and generates viable therapeutics using the following technological platforms: optimized neo-epitopes, myeloid checkpoint inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies, and bispecific antibodies.
Tumor cells are usually recognized and destroyed through a complex mechanism of immune surveillance involving different immune cells (antigen presenting cells, macrophages, lymphocytes, etc.) and helper proteins (interleukins, growth factors, etc).
Tumor cells can escape this surveillance mechanism by blocking activation of immune cells. For example, they can express specific antigens that are also expressed by healthy cells to avoid being recognized, or block immune cell activation checkpoints to neutralize the immune response.
OSE’s platform in immuno-oncology is focused on identification of specific targets to help the immune system recognize tumors and take appropriate action to kill them. Due to OSE’s advanced immunotherapy technology platforms such as its bispecific platform and expertise in specifically targeting myeloid cells (macrophages, dendritic cells) targets selected for clinical entry are often first-in-class.
Rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, psoriasis and Sjögren’s syndrome are examples of the 80 different diseases that have been associated to autoimmune dysfunction.
Autoimmune dysfunction happens through a deregulation of the immune response or of immune cell maturation. As a result, immune cells target normal cells instead of disease cells, generating pathological situations that can profoundly affect the daily life of patients.
Alloreactivity (i.e. antigens from an individual of the same species but with a different genetic and tissue structure) remains a major obstacle to organ and tissue transplants since immunological rejections result in relatively rapid loss of the graft without immunosuppressive therapy. Alloreactive lymphocytes are at the heart of these rejections and develop high intensity immune responses that we try to block. OSE Immunotherapeutics develops monoclonal antibodies against innovative targets in order to regulate the response of myeloid cells (macrophages, neutrophils), T lymphocytes and antibodies with the common objective of restoring immune balance, restoring immune tolerance and / or triggering the resolution of inflammation.
to deliver a rationally designed combination of multiple peptides with beneficial therapeutic potential.
To educate and generate an immune response from sentinel memory T cells, particularly in the respiratory tract and lung, OSE relies on its epitope (neo-epitope) optimization vaccine technology Memopi® against several antigens at the same time to cover the heterogeneity of tumors and the different variants of the same virus.