Engineering
Immune Tolerance, Transforming Immunotherapy

Anokion’s leading platform uses proprietarily engineered antigens that attach to receptors on the liver. While the liver is not always perceived as an immunological organ, in reality, it plays a vital role in immune function and offers an ideal opportunity to promote tolerance mechanisms.

The liver is constantly exposed to different antigens, both harmful and harmless. When an antigen enters the liver, it results in either activation of T-cells or T cell tolerance. The liver’s immunological functions include processing a multitude of foreign, but harmless antigens. The presentation of these antigens causes T-cell inactivation, tolerance, and apoptosis (cell death). Although the liver has T-cells that can initiate an immune response, the organ’s default status is anti-inflammatory and immunotolerant.

Liver Targeting Technology

Anokion’s approach harnesses the liver’s natural tolerance pathway to modulate the harmful inflammatory immune response in antigen-mediated autoimmune diseases. In these diseases, T cells mistakenly attack specific self-antigens as if they were foreign, disease-causing pathogens.

Our engineered proteins are targeted to receptors on liver cells with the goal to educate our immune system to recognize the target antigens, those driving autoimmune disease, as self. This process is what is termed as immune tolerance. Upon subsequent exposure to the antigen, the body no longer mounts an immune response toward whatever tissue expresses the antigen. The administration of our engineered protein is similar in concept to vaccines. Whereas a vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize and target a pathogen, our approach teaches the immune system to recognize and ignore harmless self-cells. At the same time, it leaves the rest of the immune system untouched.