Trellis Bioscience, LLC receives two separate government awards

Trellis Bioscience, LLC announced today that it received two separate government awards for their therapeutic programs under the Qualifying Therapeutic Discovery Program (QTDP). The programs are both in viral infectious respiratory disease, Influenza and Cytomegalovirus.

  1. Influenza
    The project’s goal is discovery of a clinical candidate antibody capable of aborting an influenza pandemic. Antibodies are being cloned from the blood (B lymphocytes) of donors exposed to influenza using Trellis’ proprietary CellSpot technology. There is a high need for a broadly neturalizing therapy for influenza. Typically, only ~30% of people in the US get vaccinated, and even for them the vaccination fails to induce immunity in ~15% of young adults and ~50% of children/elderly. Further, about once per decade, strain mismatch results in a drastically lower protection rate, and at less frequent intervals, drastically new strains appear such as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic which infected close to 1 billion people worldwide.
  2. CMV (human cytomegalovirus)
    The project’s goal is discovery of a clinical candidate human antibody to prevent mother-to-fetus transmission of CMV. Only about half of pregnant mothers have adequate immunity naturally, resulting in ~40,000 infants born shedding CMV every year in the US. Of these, ~8000 are born with neurological symptoms of varying severity and up to 8000 more will later develop progressive hearing loss. To date, none of the multiple vaccine efforts have yielded a product with better than 50% reduction in transmission to the fetus. This result is particularly frustrating in light of clinical evidence establishing high efficacy for passive immunization with CMV-specific gamma globulin from naturally immune donors. The vaccine setbacks may represent a failure to induce antibodies with sufficiently high affinity, as it has been established by Trellis collaborator Lenore Pereira at UC San Francisco that weak affinity antibodies to CMV actually promote transmission across the human placenta. High affinity antibodies are being cloned from the blood (B lymphocytes) of donors who have developed natural immunity to CMV using Trellis’ proprietary CellSpot technology.

Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) grants –2010/2011

Trellis Bioscience, LLC has received a Phase I and II grant from GRA. The funding supports work by Trellis’ collaborators at University of Georgia, Athens, focused on characterizing the biological activity of antibodies against influenza, and on characterizing the epitope recognized by broadly neutralizing human antibodies isolated from patients who have been infected with Flu or have been vaccinated.