Therapeutic Development

1. Ligand-assisted delivery of tolerogenic therapies to muscle

   We are developing novel approaches to deliver tolerogenic therapies to muscle. Currently, we are using novel conjugation chemistries developed by our collaborator at Purdue to link muscle-specific antibodies to a single-chain IL-2 complex engineered by our colleagues at John Hopkins. This approach is expected to deliver IL-2 complex to the muscle and induce Tregs to promote tolerance and suppress muscle inflammation while mitigating off-target effects and global immunosuppression.

2. Engineering muscle-specific chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) for regulatory T cells

   Synthetic biology has revolutionized multiple sectors of the scientific enterprise. In medicine, the most relevant synthetic biology-inspired therapeutic is the CAR-T cell. More recently this approach has been applied to Tregs with the key goal of generating CAR-Tregs to promote tolerance in autoimmunity. Our lab is developing muscle-specific CARs that targets cell surface muscle proteins as a novel approach to suppress muscle inflammation and induce tolerance to exogenously-introduced therapeutic transgenes.

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