Prellis Biologics: Building an Externalized Immune System

Prellis Bio is Future Ventures’ new investment this week, funding an army of synthetic human lymph nodes to identify, amplify, and manufacture antibody therapies for COVID-19 and potentially all new pandemic diseases (viral and bacterial). You can think of it as a surrogate human immune system, without needing any infected patients to sample from. They have already shown that this works for Zyka.

Let’s call it an “Immune System as a Service” (ISaaS)

From the Prellis Bio white paper on the Externalized Immune System:

“Viral drift, or mutagenesis, keeps humanity from moving past infectious disease. Infecting humans cannot be our sustained approach to developing immunity —our population has become too large, too connected.

Due to the poor ability of the human immune system to produce long-lived antibodies to coronavirus, it is anticipated that vaccines will have low efficacy and this virus will become endemic to our population. Continued mutations and antigenic drift that nullifies antibody treatment must be monitored and responded to extremely rapidly.

A better approach is to create human immune systems in synthetic platforms, which allows disease battles to be fought outside the healthy human body. Prellis Biologics creates synthetic human lymph nodes, the battleground of disease, which can be run cheaply and in large quantities, removing the patient’s body from the equation until an immune response is generated. The resulting immunity is directly injected into the patient. As the disease evolves across the globe, the viruses can be pooled and updated immunity can be provided to patients over time to stay ahead of the virus.

Prellis Biologics’ technology creates human antibodies without using animals; instead synthetic organs are created which emulate the human biological processes. The approach is more dependable and will scale to large numbers and varieties of antibodies, without exposing humans to the disease.

Antibodies confer protection for up to 3 months after injection, which can be used to protect high-risk / high-value healthcare workers. Antibody therapy can be used for treatment of patients who are already infected to reduce disease severity.”

The links in the slide above:
• NIH link 1: Immunogenicity to Biotherapeutics – The Role of Anti-drug Immune Complexes

• NIH link 2: Duration of Antibody Responses after Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome: “SARS-specific antibodies were maintained for an average of 2 years, and significant reduction of immunoglobulin G–positive percentage and titers occurred in the third year. Thus, SARS patients might be susceptible to reinfection >3 years after initial exposure.”

• And some worrisome news from China: “Nearly a third had unexpectedly low levels of antibodies. In some cases, antibodies could not be detected at all.”