BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

GeNeuro: Unraveling secrets of HERV

February 19, 2007 8:00 AM UTC

GeNeuro S.A. thinks its work on human endogenous retroviruses may have uncovered the cause of neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis and as a result may offer a new therapeutic strategy. The company has an antibody against a HERV-W envelope protein in preclinical testing.

"Originally it was suspected that an HTLV - or human T-lymphotropic virus - was causing MS," CSO Herve Perron told BioCentury. "So when I found in 1989 a retrovirus in MS patients, it was not totally unexpected." The 1989 finding was published in Research in Virologyand confirmed in a 1991 Lancet publication, also by Perron...