LLAVOR for innovative health technologies

Three IQS projects have obtained a grant within the call for the Knowledge Industry Grants programme – LLAVOR modality awarded by the Agency for the Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) under the Government of Catalonia: the ADEVs Kit project for the early detection of Alzheimer’s, the MaskAb project, for the consolidation of an innovative platform of conditionally activated therapeutic antibodies, and the nGSD-TAG project for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases due to glycogen storage.

The LLAVOR grants are intended for innovative projects in the initial phase of the plan for transferring technology or knowledge with the potential to be incorporated into the productive sector and generate value in society. The objective of these grants is to finance the actions included in the plan to study and validate their technical and commercial viability and reach a sufficient degree of maturity that allows the proof-of-concept or service validation phase to offer guarantees.

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive degenerative disorder of brain cells and the main cause of dementia worldwide, for which there are only reactive and inefficient pharmacological treatments, the efficiency of which would increase if they could be administered in the early stages of the disease. However, current diagnostic tools are quite expensive and inaccessible or very invasive for patients.

Dr Francesc X. Guix Ràfols, with the Materials Engineering Group (GEMAT) at IQS, is leading the ADEVs Kit – Early Detection of Alzheimer’s project with the aim of developing an innovative diagnostic kit for the prognosis and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, which is based on the use of blood plasma and neuronal extracellular vesicles (EVs), which can indicate the presence of specific diseases such as Alzheimer’s. It entails a new sandwich ELISA diagnostic kit in which neuronal EVs are captured through the use of specific antibodies that can distinguish the vesicles that carry “information” corresponding to the existence of the disease.

Antibody-based therapies are effective in treating various diseases, such as many types of cancer, but have the disadvantage of also reaching healthy tissues where the same receptors are present and causing unwanted side effects, thus decreasing the effectiveness of treatments. The ChemSynBio group at IQS is working on the development of new antibody technologies that are selective for the area of therapeutic interest, which make it possible to reduce the unwanted accumulation of antibodies and avoid side effects. This technology, a combination of chemistry and synthetic biology, is based on reversible antibody masking, which has already been successfully tested for the antibody targeted to the EGFR, in the earlier project Aptibody.

Within this research group, Dr Cristina Díaz Perlas is now leading the MaskAb project, which aims to go further in the validation of this masked anti-EGFR antibody and demonstrate a broader applicability of the platform created by the group and patent it, given that this masking technology is very versatile and can be adapted to any antibody or target format, with the potential to revolutionise current treatments.

Within the Brain Metabolism Lab, Dr Jordi Duran Castells is leading the nGSD-TAG project that aims to develop a non-invasive treatment for rare neurodegenerative diseases related to the abnormal accumulation of glycogen in the brain, one of Dr Duran’s fields of expertise.

The group has discovered that the protein amylase can be an efficient therapy for the destruction of these glycogen clusters, but the challenge remains of administering it in a way that can cross the blood-brain barrier. This project aims to cross it through the use of mRNA nanoparticles, sending a genetic instruction to brain cells so that they themselves produce the necessary amylase.