Autoimmune diseases affect about 4% of the world’s population and comprise over 80 different disease conditions. No targeted therapy exists that would allow pre-selection of a patient for treatment designed specifically against the autoimmune condition.
IMT is the first company to target the root cause of autoimmunity with therapeutic design directed at HLA variants known to confer high disease risk. The Company platform builds drug molecules for specific blockade of an HLA protein in a given autoimmune disease as a novel paradigm in drug development.
Our drug development of oral therapies employs a unique approach to balance the affinity to HLA binding site(s) to achieve blockade versus protecting inherent immunity against pathogens conferred by the HLA proteins.
The impact of our platform has been demonstrated with a human Phase 1b clinical study in type 1 diabetes that preselected patients with HLA DQ8 status and showed the selected drug’s high effectiveness in DQ8 blockade. We are establishing a pipeline of drugs against HLA DQ2 (celiac), HLA DQ8 (Type 1 diabetes and celiac), and other HLA-related autoimmune indications.
Founded by renowned physician scientists, Drs. Aaron Michels and Peter Gottlieb, and based on the ground-breaking work led by the late Professor George Eisenbarth, IMT has brought to translational medicine an elegant approach to target the root cause of an autoimmune response with drug binding to HLA clefts known to present disease-specific peptides to effector immune cells.