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ImmTOR™ Technology

Overcoming immunogenicity to transform the lives of patients.

What is ImmTORTM?

Selecta Biosciences’ immune tolerance platform, ImmTORTM, is designed to give rise to antigen-specific immunity, mitigating unwanted immune responses.

ImmTORTM has the potential to unlock the full potential of biologic therapies, including enabling redosing of life saving gene therapies, and to restore self-tolerance in autoimmune diseases.

The Science Behind ImmTORTM

Generating specific immune tolerance

Unwanted immunogenicity can compromise the efficacy and safety of a biologic drug.

Generating specific immune tolerance

  • Immunogenicity

    Immunogenicity is the ability of a substance, such as a foreign or potentially dangerous protein, to provoke an antigen-specific immune response.

    Antigens are substances, usually proteins, produced by cells, viruses, fungi, bacteria, or other organisms. Immunogenicity is important to enable the immune system to defend the body against disease-causing pathogens and other harmful substances.

    However, immunogenicity can also result in unwanted immune responses. In the case of biologic therapies, the formation of anti-drug antibodies (ADAs) can neutralize activity, alter the pharmacokinetics and biodistribution of biologic drugs, or cause hypersensitivity reactions and potentially life-threatening events. The addition of ImmTOR to biologic therapies has the potential to provide immediate benefit from the biologic while enabling patients to stay on therapy longer.

    In the case of self-antigens, unwanted immune responses can lead to autoimmune disease; ImmTOR has the potential to restore natural tolerance to self-antigens. 

  • The Challenge

    ImmTORTM combines nanoparticle technology with rapamycin to generate antigen-specific immune tolerance.

    ImmTORTM is designed to induce antigen-specific immune tolerance by targeting rapamycin to immune cells using nanoparticle technology, which has been clinically proven as an effective delivery system. When administered to a patient, ImmTOR nanoparticles are filtered out by lymph nodes, spleen and liver, where they are taken up by antigen-presenting cells (APC), such as dendritic cells (DC), a type of APC which can trigger immunogenic as well as tolerogenic responses from T cells. ImmTOR promotes the induction of tolerogenic DC which go on to activate antigen-specific regulatory T cells to suppress the immune response to the antigen.

  • ImmTOR’s potential

    Thought of in a more concise way, ImmTOR™ + Antigen = Tolerance.

    Selecta is leveraging this approach to generate immune tolerance to therapeutic enzymes, viral vectors and auto-antigens that play a role in autoimmune disease. 

Controlled, scalable manufacturing

The universal formulation of ImmTORTM is produced at a commercial scale via a well-controlled and scalable manufacturing process. 

Selecta has developed a commercial-scale, Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), process to ensure that ImmTOR is consistently produced and controlled according to quality standards.

ImmTOR’s tolerogenic activity has been reproduced in multiple independent laboratories using a range of biologic therapies and immunogenic antigens, validating the platform’s ability to mitigate anti-drug antibodies. This research has been published in several high-level peer-reviewed journals including Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

Partnerships

Partner with us to unlock the potential of ImmTORTM

Our ImmTOR platform has exciting potential across a broad range of therapeutic areas. Learn more about our partnerships and partnering opportunities.

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Building on the Success of SEL-212

Our ImmTORTM platform is clinically validated

With a Phase 3 clinical program in chronic refractory gout that has been strategically licensed to Sobi, Selecta’s ImmTOR platform is clinically validated to mitigate the immunogenicity of a fungal-derived enzyme. Selecta intends to build on this track record of success by combining ImmTOR with other biologics to create a pipeline of novel tolerogenic therapies.

AAV Vector Gene Therapies

Selecta is leveraging its ImmTOR platform to mitigate the body’s immune response to adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector gene therapies, potentially unlocking their full therapeutic potential.

Learn more about Our Approach
Our Pipeline

Advancing novel tolerogenic therapies

With our clinically validated ImmTOR platform, we intend to build on our track record of success as we advance new tolerogenic therapies through development. Dig deep into our pipeline of ImmTOR-driven therapies.

Pipeline Details