Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a group of chronic diseases characterized by airflow limitations in the lung. COPD is a critical international health problem. It is estimated to affect up to 600 million people worldwide and by 2020 it will become the third most frequent cause of death. In Europe alone, COPD affects up to 10% of people (i.e. more people than breast cancer and diabetes) and it takes the life of around 300,000 Europeans each year. Up to date, COPD has no cure as current treatments fail to halt the long-term decline in lung function. They are only able to delay its progression. Those treatments however, are associated with a variety of side effects some of which can be acute and even life threatening. Thus, COPD remains a disease with a significant unmet medical need.
In this project, we performed necessary activities for the evaluation of a potentially groundbreaking approach for treating COPD. Our approach is focusing on antibody-mediated clearance of senescent cells, which accumulate in tissues with age and contribute to multiple age-related diseases, including COPD. We have established in our lab a mouse model for COPD. We have discovered a set of targets on senescent cells and used some of these targets to develop antibodies that can specifically target senescent cells. We have developed antibodies against one of the targets and evaluated the ability of some of these antibodies to target age-related lung diseases. We also took all the necessary steps for commercialization of our approach. We teemed with Yeda Ltd, the technology transfer arm of the Weizmann Institute in order to commercialize our discoveries. We identified several potential commercial partners that were interested in the targets we discovered and our antibody-based approach. We performed intensive meetings with these partners and discussed potential modes of collaboration. One of these companies currently peruses a commercial development of the antibodies. We firmly believe that our approach will pave the way for the development of novel treatment strategies applicable to other age-related diseases, such as osteoarthritis, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative diseases.
