The Paradox of Immunity

Given the exciting news from Virdante Pharmaceuticals regarding their patent, I thought it would be cool to feature a recent lecture given by the company’s founding scientist, Jeffrey Ravetch.

Jeffrey Ravetch

Dr. Ravetch graduated from Yale University in 1973 and received his Ph.D. in 1978 from The Rockefeller University, where he studied under Norton Zinder and Peter Model. He received his M.D. from Cornell University Medical College in 1979 and completed his postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health with Philip Leder. In 1982 Dr. Ravetch joined the faculty of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and in 1984 also became a guest investigator in Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology. He was appointed professor at Rockefeller in 1996 and named Theresa and Eugene M. Lang Professor in 1997.

Dr. Ravetch received the Coley Award from the Cancer Research Institute in 2007, the American Association of Immunologists-Huang Foundation Meritorious Career Award in 2005, the Lee C. Howley Sr. Prize for Arthritis Research in 2004 and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Award in Molecular Parasitology in 1986. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.

Virdante Granted Key U.S. Patent

I am proud to announce that OUP portfolio company, Virdante Pharmaceuticals, has been granted a key patent by the USPTO that supports the company’s “Sialic Switch” technology for improving the anti-inflammatory activity of antibody-based drugs to treat autoimmune and inflammatory disorders. Virdante’s Sialic Switch technology is based on the principle of activating a novel anti-inflammatory pathway by specifically sialylating Fc-linked glycans of IgG antibodies.

US Patent 7,846,744, titled, “Methods of Identifying Anti-Inflammatory Compounds,” covers the use of human receptor DC-SIGN (or mouse SIGN-R1) to screen for drugs that either suppress or activate anti-inflammatory activity. Jeffrey Ravetch, M.D., Ph.D., of The Rockefeller University and Virdante’s scientific founder, previously discovered that DC-SIGN binds a sialylated Fc fragment of IgG antibodies that is required for the anti-inflammatory activity of plasma-derived intravenous immune globulin (IVIG). This binding interaction is thought to initiate a pathway in which sialylated IgG promotes an anti-inflammatory state.

Virdante Pharmaceuticals

Virdante is a privately held biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of drugs for autoimmune and inflammatory disorders. Our products incorporate a proprietary “sialic switch” technology to improve the anti-inflammatory properties of antibodies.  Dr. Jeffrey Ravetch, a professor at The Rockefeller University and a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, discovered this novel anti-inflammatory biological pathway and subsequently founded Virdante to develop safer and more effective therapeutic antibodies. Virdante exclusively licensed the technology from The Rockefeller University and established a strategic research alliance with Dr. Ravetch’s laboratory to continue to explore the biology of the sialic switch technology.

The Rockefeller University - Centennial Scientific Symposium

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending The Rockefeller University’s Centennial Scientific Symposium. Dr. Eric Lander, founder of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, delivered a fascinating talk on recent advances in the field of genomics.

Moore’s Law hypothesized that technology power would roughly double every 18 months and the law has held true for almost all technology disciplines.  In his talk, Dr. Lander estimated that the Broad’s sequencing power has increased 100,000-fold over the last 5 years due to the implementation of second generation sequencing technologies – thus shattering Moore’s Law.  The amount of data points the Broad is able to produce is astonishing, but that data means nothing if there is no way to decipher it.

Up until roughly 2005, the genomics community focused almost exclusively on gene mapping – comparing coding regions of the genome to find variants that could be correlated with disease.  It was believed that by comparing hundreds of genomes with new sequencing technologies, researchers would be able to find clear correlations between gene variants and disease, but that has not been the case.  A small cadre of geneticists has proposed a different course of research, to look for answers in non-coding sections of the genome.

Dr. John Rinn of the Broad Institute recently discovered a class of non-protein coding RNAs called large intervening non-coding RNA, or LincRNA.  Deep sequencing studies have found LincRNAs to be evolutionary conserved sequences and map to intergenic regions.   When specific LincRNAs are knocked out they can have a profound effect on everything from gene regulation to protein trafficking. While non-coding sequences were once thought of as genetic trash, Dr. Rinn’s work indicates that non-coding sequences provide a wealth of genetic information. 

Recently published work by Dr. John Rinn and a number of his contemporaries have shown that our understanding of genomics is still in its infancy. Comparative genomics will ultimately lead to improved clinical outcomes for patients, but the full potential of genomics cannot be unlocked until we a more comprehensive understanding of how coding and non-coding sections of the genome interact to regulate disease pathways.