3 April 2008
Immune systems of the future
Is testing for immune response in vitro a pipe dream? Maybe not for long: the Modular IMmune In vitro Constructs system (MIMIC) should enable early human-based testing of immunopharmaceuticals and vaccines, without a single animal in sight, and could eventually be extended to autoimmune diseases research.
MIMIC is a two-stage microscale model of the human immune system, set in the wells of cell culture plates. Starting with blood from human donors, T-cells, B-cells and monocytes are extracted and applied to wells containing a layer of human endothelial cells above a layer of collagen. The blood cells migrate through the endothelial cells into the collagen matrix and spontaneously differentiate into dendritic cells. These reverse migrate into the supernatant and are activated by a challenge antigen.
The antigen-presenting dendritic cells are removed and added to the lymph node model, in a second cell-culture plate. The immune response is characterised in terms of cytokines, antibodies and activated lymphocytes, to create a full in vitro model used for automated high-throughput testing.
VaxDesign, an American biotech company who designed the model, say:
“We developed MIMIC to address inherent flaws with current animal testing models, namely that animals can never offer completely predictive results of a new vaccine or therapy because of basic physiological differences between humans and animals. We created the MIMIC technology not only as an alternative to animal testing, but one that is more predictive of human responses.”
The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative chose VaxDesign to receive its Innovation Fund award, which supports potential breakthrough technologies, because of the progress MIMIC represents over animal studies. The technology is faster, more translatable to humans and, by collecting immune cells from different donors, can be used to test in genetically diverse populations before a vaccine enters humans in vivo.
Further information: www.vaxdesign.com/advanced-immunotherapy-testing/