AFFiRiS AG

Overview

AFFiRiS develops synthetic vaccines against chronic diseases with unmet medical needs and attractive markets. The antigens of these vaccines are short peptides which function as B-cell epitopes. The aim of an AFFITOPE vaccination is to induce antibody immune responses which will address each target structure with the relevant appropriate specificity. Cytotoxic T-cell responses and autoimmune helper T-cell induction are excluded simply because the peptides used are too small to trigger the respective pathways. The T-cell help required is provided by a carrier protein such as KLH covalently linked to the peptides.

The basis for these developments is the proprietary AFFITOME®’s technology. This technology does not deliver just a single vaccine for the treatment of each disease but a whole pool of product candidates. This is achieved by using so-called molecular mimicry. Thus, not the target molecule itself or its fragments thereof as vaccine antigens (e.g. ß-amyloid in Alzheimer’s disease), but a peptide comprising an unrelated amino-acid sequence. Therefore the AFFITOME® technology provides several advantages as compared with competitor’s approaches, which depend on the native sequence, respectively. The main advantages are:

The antigen is immunologically “foreign” so there is no need to break tolerance.
There is a unique quality to fine tune the specificity of the immune response, e.g. against neoepitopes. This offers a superior level of safety which cannot be reached with native sequences. Neoepitopes are structures which only occur on the pathological molecule but not on any “healthy” precursor protein. In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, the target molecule ß-amyloid is derived from the amyloid precursor protein, APP. APP occurs in almost all tissues and in its soluble form, sAPP, it functions as a neuroprotective factor. If the ß-amyloid or a fragment of it is used as a vaccine, it cannot be excluded that the induced immune response will cross react with the parental APP, as it comprises the identical amino acid sequence.
If, against expectation, a promising preclinical candidate does not show the desired tolerability or efficacy in clinical trials, further peptides from the AFFITOME® pool can be used in. Therefore, our approach has a significantly increased probability of success compared to competitors, which have to rely on one product candidate as they are dependent on native sequences.