IBio, Inc Announces Update for its Lead COVID-19 Vaccine Program, IBIO-202, in Light of the Emergence of the Omicron (B.1.1.529) Variant of SARS-CoV-2
November 29, 2021 at 08:45 am EST
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iBio, Inc. announced an update for its lead COVID-19 vaccine program, IBIO-202, in light of the emergence of the Omicron (B.1.1.529) variant of SARS-CoV-2. On November 26, 2021, the World Health Organization?s (?WHO?) Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution classified Omicron as a Variant of Concern.1 According to the WHO, the Omicron variant has at least 30 mutations in the spike ("S") protein, which has been the target of first-generation COVID-19 vaccines. The Company believes that the N protein represents an important target for next-generation COVID-19 vaccines for several reasons. First, the N protein is abundantly expressed during infection and contains multiple immunogenic epitopes. Second, the N protein is more highly conserved than the S protein, and therefore, new variants may be less likely to escape vaccine protection. Third, research has shown that the N protein appears to be significantly more effective than the S protein in stimulating antibody-dependent natural killer cell activation, a critical element of the adaptive immune response that the SARS-CoV-2 virus attempts to evade.
iBio, Inc. is a preclinical stage biotechnology company that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) for the development of precision antibodies. The Company develops biopharmaceuticals using computational biology and 3D-modeling of subdominant and conformational epitopes, prospectively enabling the discovery of new antibody treatments for hard-to-target cancers and other diseases. Its StableHu technology is an AI-based tool designed to predict a library of antibodies with fully human Complementarity-Determining Region (CDR) variants based on an input antibody. It is in the process of building its preclinical pipeline, which focuses primarily on immuno-oncology. Its pipeline includes IBIO-101, Endostatin E4, TROP-2 x CD3, MUC16, EGFRvIII, and CCR8. IBIO-101 is an anti-CD25 monoclonal antibody (mAb) that has demonstrated in preclinical models of disease the ability to bind and deplete immunosuppressive regulatory T (Treg) cells to inhibit the growth of solid tumors.