Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory demyelinating disease of the central nervous system, often diagnosed in people (mostly women) aged 20 to 40, leading to increasing disability and greatly reducing the quality of life for patients. The introduction of a broad range of anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive drugs improves disease control, but these treatments must be given life-long and are not devoid of adverse effects.
Therefore, there is a significant and unmet medical need for safe and effective new therapies for MS that target the cause of the disease to reduce the duration and frequency of treatments as well as limit side effects. Innovative therapies based on the infusion of a specialized subset of immune cells, named tolerogenic DC, have been recently tested in patients with active forms of MS, showing that the treatment is feasible, safe, and well tolerated with no side effects.
With the goal of improving the curative efficacy of tolerogenic DC in MS, IMMUTOL aims to develop a second generation of tolerogenic DC product by applying artificial intelligence to predict and optimize the quality of the product; by optimizing the generation of the advanced product and characterize its activity in vitro and in vivo; by optimizing the protocol for the manufacturing of the product. All these activities are guided by a regulatory roadmap continuously assessed by regulatory bodies and patients and by building a business plan to guarantee the advanced product's commercial application.
IMMUTOL will develop a more potent and durable treatment for autoimmune diseases with an unmet medical need, in particular MS, and will pave the way for new tolerogenic cell-based therapies to cure/reverse several autoimmune conditions.
