BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Selective suppression

October 11, 2004 7:00 AM UTC

Selective suppression of the immune response is a goal in the treatment of many immune diseases, as overall suppression usually makes patients vulnerable to opportunistic infections. GenPat77 Pharmacogenetics AG thinks it has identified a protein, TIRC7, that will help solve the problem, as targeting it induces hyper-responsiveness in lymphocyte populations involved in the onset of transplant rejection and autoimmune diseases.

TIRC7 (T cell immune response cDNA 7) is a large transmembrane protein that was discovered 10 years ago by Nalan Utku, president and CEO of GenPat77, when she was looking for novel targets expressed in early immune responses. "It appeared highly promising, as it is expressed on subsets of both T and B lymphocytes," she said. These subsets, which make up 20-30% of the total lymphocyte population, seem to be involved in infiltrating tissue at the beginning of an immune reaction...