Congrats to Prellis on their progress on externalizing the human immune system with a lab-grown version of a human lymph node (as imaged here).
From TechCrunch today: “By creating this immune system in a dish, we can actually test if those therapeutics are going to elicit an immune response before it goes into a human,” founder and CEO Melanie Matheu told TechCrunch. “Our company’s edge is that EXIS is out of the box, fully human.”
Prellis’ approach is to model the immune system in miniature and develop a cadre of drug candidates by mining immune responses. Matheu calls it “natural intelligence” as opposed to artificial intelligence.
The company can create 1,200 organoids from one blood draw, challenge those immune systems with a particular antigen, and see what each immune system comes up with. That process, she says, can be done with different blood donors with different immune system characteristics to create a plethora of responses to analyze.
Matheu says the company has developed antibodies responsive to SARS-CoV-2, Influenza A and Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever (these results haven’t been published). The company is developing partnerships with five drug companies”
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