MPS I is a rare genetic disease that is incurable and lethal by age 12. Seattle-based Immusoft thinks it can harness a key part of the immune system to manufacture a missing enzyme needed to treat the disease. It represents a broader effort on the part of the company to develop a platform to treat a wide range of disease by turning immune system cells into drug factories.
For centuries, explorers have searched the world for the fountain of youth. Today’s billionaires believe they can create it, using technology and data.
What’s less well known about Thiel is his affinity for biotechnology. … He has invested in more than 25 startups…. Immusoft … is using gene therapy to turn blood cells into drug factories …. Matthew Scholz, a software entrepreneur, says he became obsessed with the idea that the immune system can be “programmed.” … The Breakout grant allowed him to demonstrate his ideas in mice for the first time.
Seattle biotech startup Immusoft Corp. has raised $2.37 million from investors, including FF Science, a San Francisco venture fund that targets early stage technology and science companies. Founder and CEO Matthew Scholz, who launched Immusoft in 2009, said the funding will allow his company to scale up research, including approaching the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about doing human clinical trials…
Immunological memory, as provided by antibodies, depends on the continued presence of antibody-secreting cells, such as long-lived plasma cells of the bone marrow. Survival niches for these memory plasma cells are limited in number. In an established immune system, acquisition of new plasma cells, generated in response to recent pathogenic challenges, requires elimination of old memory plasma cells. Here, we review the adaptation of plasma cell memory to new pathogens…
“It struck me that the way the body attacks a pathogen is similar to the way a computer attacks a password,” Scholz said. “You have this idea of immunity memory. If you get a vaccine, your body remembers it and suddenly the disease that used to kill you won’t even give you the sniffles. … So we really set about treating disease from an information-based perspective.”
The future of pharma is to learn to address the human body as an information platform. A company in Seattle named Immusoft, partly financed by venture investor Peter Thiel, has been successfully pursuing this strategy and proven its feasibility with mice, using viruses and other vectors to program immune cells to emit needed molecules.
Imagine never having to take a pill again. Instead, mini drug factories hidden inside your bones, and made from your own immune cells, would churn out personalised drugs and other molecules designed to keep you fit and healthy. Such a factory has been created in mice, and could soon be tested in humans to treat HIV. “We want to turn people’s cells into drug factories, giving them the genetic information they need to produce their own treatment,” says Matthew Scholz of Immusoft in Seattle, which is developing the technique…
Matthew Scholz has been told many times that his idea for reprogramming the body’s immune cells to create drugs was impossible. Maybe dangerous. Maybe just dumb. Scholz, a computer scientist with no formal biology training, could easily have been written off as a quixotic dreamer until this spring, when he got his breakout moment. The foundation started by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, decided that Scholz’s startup,Immusoft, just might be onto something, granting it close to $400,000…
While most of us are still reeling in shock after last week’s one billion Instagram buy, Peter Thiel — through both Founders Fund and the Thiel Foundation — is leading the charge into a future where humans don’t age or suffer from cancer, among other things. Call it crazy or whatever you’d like, but there’s no doubt that people who are trying to drastically change the world for the better often do…
