Biological engineering company Ligandal, Inc. is applying its unique peptide-based delivery technologies to develop a prospective antidote and vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus) to be formulated and developed in response to the worldwide pandemic.
Ligandal's approach utilizes peptide scaffolds (think of them as nanorobots) that are designed with supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) to mimic the critical immune binding and responsive elements of the virus. Additionally, these peptide scaffolds can be designed to serve as rapid-response antidotes to an ongoing infection.
The company's peptide-based technology is expected to aid in eliminating the virus from an already-infected host, while bolstering the immune response. In other words, the approach to creating vaccines and antidotes against SARS-CoV-2, whereby the damage of SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 is offset, is to eliminate the immune cloaking mechanisms of the virus and instill an ultra-specific immune response. This contrasts existing vaccine and therapeutic options which may not adequately form an immune response, and frequently treat symptomatic conditions without addressing the root cause of viral propagation and infection.
"We are looking at medicine in a new way," stated Ligandal's CEO Andre Watson. "Instead of treating symptoms or downstream effects, our approach is to reprogram the source of the problem, whether it be at the level of proteins, RNA or DNA. In other words, we can predictively model, synthesize and treat a variety of diseases at their source. This means that the normal way of treating diseases such as viruses and cancers, killing them, can be transformed to reprogramming and printing the body's own physiology to heal from within.
"This changes all the assumptions, enabling a new way of thinking for treating disease and creating life enhancement. These same techniques can be used for rare monogenic diseases, complex multifactorial diseases, infectious diseases, regenerative medicine, immunotherapies, and beyond. This is because we are working at the atomic level, ranging from designing custom protein-mimetic peptides to building sophisticated nanoscale delivery systems for delivering DNA, RNA, CRISPR, and beyond."
In the present instance, the company is reprogramming the viral binding elements of SARS-CoV-2 ("COVID") to no longer afford a "cloak" for this sophisticated immune-shielded virus. It also offsets the need for alternative therapeutic solutions because the peptide scaffolds will expose the virus for the host's own immune system to learn and deal with. This approach is fully synthetic, which lends itself to rapid prototyping and personalized approaches for various viruses. It can also scale-up on the order of days or weeks instead of years.
"Ligandal's goal is to make lifecare available for all, and affordable for all," stated Eric Greenberg, member of Ligandal's board of directors. "Today's systems are not optimized for our current technology and understanding of the human genome. They weren't engineered from scratch with today's knowledge. As I foreshadowed in 2003 in the Acumen Journal of Life Sciences, where I was Chairman and CEO, I warned the world of bio-warfare and asked if we were prepared. Medicine must rethink traditional approaches if we are to rapidly respond to threats from new generations of pathogens, whether they crossed species or were bioengineered. It is our opinion that COVID is also a neurological virus. We are seeing today how rapidly these pathogens can spread and impact both respiratory and neurological systems, putting entire communities at risk. That's why Ligandal is aggressively pursuing treatment strategies that can rapidly adapt to any form of viral attack and/or infection."
Immunity and Protection Challenges
Current approaches of developing vaccines and allopathic treatments may not provide adequate protection against this virus, given the virus' sophisticated immune cloaking mechanisms whereby the virus forms a coating in soluble ACE2, which is also present upon the cell membrane as a viral-entry mechanism. However, this soluble ACE2 is hypothesized to act as a shield against antibody ...
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