Angany entered into collaboration for a series of preclinical studies that will evaluate the safety and efficacy of BP/AH-01, Angany’s lead peanut allergy biological candidate.
While announcements about COVID-19 vaccine development continue to rain down from the peaks of pharmaceutical giants, a potential breakthrough blew in from Quebec City for a very unique kind of vaccine: one against a leading cause of ruined children’s birthday parties: the peanut allergy.
Angany, a private, late preclinical stage French-Canadian pharmaceutical company, announced Tuesday that it has entered a partnering agreement with Dr. Wayne Shreffler, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the division of pediatric allergy & immunology and director of the food allergy center at Massachusetts General Hospital and MassGeneral Hospital for Children. Together, they plan to conduct a series of preclinical studies that will evaluate the safety and efficacy of BP/AH-01, Angany’s lead peanut allergy biological candidate.
“We are very pleased that our new approach to allergy immunotherapy has generated the enthusiastic collaboration of some of the most prestigious scientific teams in the world and we look forward to this opportunity to break new grounds in allergy immunotherapy with Dr. Shreffler and his team,” said Angany CEO Dr. Louis-Phillipe Vézina, Ph.D. in a statement. “This important milestone in Angany’s pharmaceutical development program should raise new hope for millions of people affected by food allergy worldwide.”
Only 0.6 to 1.3% of the general U.S. population, is significantly allergic to peanuts. However, children are more severely impacted: nearly 5% of children under the age of five years have food allergies, possibly because their immune systems have not yet fully developed. Additionally, peanut allergy is the most likely food-related allergy to cause anaphylactic shock, a life-threatening allergic reaction. HealthMatch identifies several other potential risks and impacts of peanut allergy.
By combining two proprietary technologies, their eBioparticle and eBioparticle-potentiated immunotherapy, Angany has created a novel disease-modifying treatment for peanut allergy that tricks the immune system into reacting in a different, safer manner via active immunotherapeutic biologic BP/AH-01.
“The potential treatment of allergy using an auto-adjuvanted vector builds upon the known strong antibody response from allergen-specific IgG,” Shreffler said. “The ultimate goal is to find new and better ways to help the great many children and adults whose lives are affected by peanut allergy.”
Using synthetically-sourced allergen ultra-structures that appear similarly to those found on the surface of viruses, BP/AH-01 serves as a molecular magician, hoodwinking the immune system and convincing it that peanut allergens are to be treated as viral allergens. Both in vivo and ex vivo research has so far suggested that this form of allergen immunization will result in a strong allergen-specific protective immune response, with a correspondingly low allergic response to that allergen.
Potentially, this could mean that the adrenaline-filled rushes for epinephrine in movie scenes may eventually become more dramatically nerve-fraying than the real deal, as the need for emergency antihistamines starkly decreases in immediacy and severity, or even disappears, across several categories of food allergens.
It still will be a good while before the medical community sees an honest-to-goodness peanut allergy vaccine. Angany Senior Vice President of Medical and Corporate Affairs Dr. Guy Tropper, M.D., told BioSpace that the company hopes to see BP/AH-01 achieve clinical entry by late 2022 or early 2023. For now, though, this preclinical partnership marks a promising first step.
