Description du projet
Des nanocoquilles neutralisantes pour un ciblage viral élargi
Les infections virales touchent des millions de personnes chaque année, mais pour 70 % des virus pathogènes connus, il n’existe aucun traitement. Le projet VIROFIGHT, financé par l’UE, propose une nouvelle approche radicale pour lutter contre les infections virales en construisant des nanocoquilles synthétiques capables de reconnaître et d’engloutir spécifiquement des virus entiers, en les neutralisant par occlusion. Le projet interdisciplinaire intègre la chimie, la nano-ingénierie moléculaire et la virologie avec pour mission de développer et de tester des prototypes de nanocoquilles engloutissantes ayant pour capacité principale de neutraliser un virus donné. Le potentiel de VIROFIGHT est révolutionnaire, car des prototypes de coquilles peuvent être développés et produits au cours des semaines suivant la découverte d’un agent pathogène viral et le concept de médicament peut être adapté à une grande variété de virus.
Objectif
Viral infections affect millions of people every year and cause tremendous human suffering and costs to society. For approximately 70% of all WHO listed viruses, no treatment is available and the antiviral drugs that do exist typically must be applied very early after infection to be effective. The VIROFIGHT consortium proposes a radically new approach to fight viral infections, to help reduce the scale and sheer impact of viral infections, to address the problem of a lack of broadly applicable antiviral treatments, and to create means for combating emerging pathogens. Instead of targeting virus-specific proteins or enzymes by small molecules as current antivirals do, we will construct synthetic nano-shells that can specifically recognize and engulf entire viruses to efficiently neutralize the pathogen by occlusion. To achieve this technological target, our interdisciplinary project integrates supramolecular chemistry, molecular nanoengineering, and virology with the mission to develop and test prototypes of engulfing nano-shells that have the principal capacity to neutralize any given virus. We will fabricate biocompatible nano-shells through DNA origami and protein design and attach modularly virus-specific molecules to them in a multivalent fashion, to exploit avidity effects for strong virus binding. The virus binders will be identified through rapid in vitro selection processes designed to be applicable to any target virus. Neutralization assays will be used to test our concept on a variety of viruses. VIROFIGHT has the potential to attain revolutionary properties: shell prototypes can be developed and produced in the course of weeks after discovery of a viral pathogen, and the drug concept can be used and adapted for a wide variety of viral pathogens, without having detailed knowledge about the virus. The VIROFIGHT concept aimed at eradicating multiple viruses thus has great potential for decreasing the burden for patients and saving costs to society.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinateur
80333 Muenchen
Allemagne