Oral antibodies for prophylactic treatment of enteric infectious diseases

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a top ten public threat to human health. Immuron is developing innovative colostrum-based oral antibodies to treat infectious diseases without the use of antibiotics.

Australian biopharmaceutical company Immuron has developed a platform technology that generates highly specific colostrum-based antibodies to prevent and/or treat enteric diseases without the issues associated with antibiotics.

Orally-delivered antibodies specifically target enteric pathogens in the GI tract, preventing their attachment to the intestinal wall. Immuron’s oral-targeted therapeutics offer significant advantages over intravenous administration due to their lack of systemic absorption into the blood stream, targeting the drug to the GI tract to rapidly neutralise and clear the infection.

The key ingredient used, bovine colostrum, is a natural product containing no artificial additives or nutrients, and has a high safety profile.

Travelan

Immuron’s flagship commercial product, Travelan®, targets multiple strains of enterotoxigenic E. coli (ETEC) – the major cause of ‘Travellers’ diarrhoea’. Clinical studies have demonstrated 84% to >90% protective efficacy in preventing ETEC-attributable diarrhoea in two clinical studies.¹

Testing for new drug candidates

Immuron’s pipeline includes several drug candidates at various stages of pre-clinical and clinical development.

In collaboration with Dr Dena Lyras and her team at Monash University, Immuron is developing IMM-529 as an adjunctive therapy for the prevention and/or treatment of recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI). IMM-529 targets Toxin B (TcB), the spores and the surface layer proteins of the vegetative cells. This unique three-target approach has yielded promising results in pre-clinical infection and relapse models, including:

  • Prevention of primary disease (80% P =0.0052).
  • Protection of disease recurrence (67%, P <0.01).
  • Treatment of primary disease (78.6%, P<0.0001; TcB HBC).

Importantly, IMM-529 antibodies cross-react with many different human strains of C. diff, including hypervirulent fast-growing strains. To our knowledge, IMM-529 is, to date, the only investigational drug that has shown therapeutic potential in all three phases of the disease.²

Another approach is focused on targeting bacterial species that have become resistant or unresponsive to mainstream antibiotics. Again, in collaboration with Dr Dena Lyras and her team, Immuron is developing a new oral therapeutic, IMM-986, which targets vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE). The first clinical isolates of VRE were discovered in 1986 in France and in the UK.³ The objective of this collaboration is to determine whether VRE-specific colostrum results in decolonisation or removal of the resistant bacteria using established in vivo models.

References

  1. Otto et al., 2011: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/00365521.2011.574726
  2. Hutton et al., 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-03982-5
  3. Hryniewicz, W. et al., 1999: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-0691.1999.tb00181.x

Please note, this article will also appear in the 21st edition of our quarterly publication.

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