Altermune's Alphamers

Altermune Technologies LLC is taking immunotherapy back to its day job of fighting infections with a new technology that coats bacteria with a sugar, and recruits circulating antibodies against the sugar to find and destroy the organisms. The strategy follows a trend in cancer immunotherapy of harnessing the immune system in new ways, and departs from standard antibacterials or immunotherapy approaches that depend on inducing or injecting antibodies against the pathogens themselves.

"It is really strange that we don't consider using the immune system in infectious disease therapy. We are seeing great results in cancer," said Victor Nizet, professor of pediatrics and pharmacy at the University of California San Diego, and a member of Altermune's scientific advisory board. "There are a lot of innovative ways in which this can be explored in infectious diseases, and we are starting to explore one of them now." Altermune's platform - dubbed alphamers - is the latest brainchild of PCR inventor Kary Mullis, and involves conjugates containing the sugar α-Gal linked to an aptamer that targets a specific bacterial epitope and doesn't bind host cells. The idea is that once the sugar-aptamer conjugate coats the pathogens, it will attract antibodies that can opsonize the organisms and trigger their elimination. ...