SOUTH KINGSTON, R.I.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MindImmune Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company focused on neuroinflammation and Alzheimer’s disease, today announced it has been awarded a grant by Rhode Island Life Science Hub to accelerate the company’s preclinical development work on MITI-101, its monoclonal antibody designed to prevent the recruitment of neuro-inflammatory innate immune cells from the periphery into the brain. MITI-101 is under development for the treatment of mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s disease.
“This award enables us to accelerate execution of the critical development work needed to start first-in-human studies of MITI-101, and we are grateful to the Rhode Island Life Science Hub for its support of our work,” said Stevin Zorn, PhD, co-founder, President and CEO of MindImmune. “While progress has been made in the development of therapies for Alzheimer’s, medicines that have achieved regulatory approval offer only modest clinical benefit and carry significant side effects. We believe that significant therapeutic benefit in Alzheimer’s requires approaches that focus on the immune system’s effect in the brain.”
MITI-101, which neutralizes CD11c (a subunit of complement receptor 4 or CR4) in the bloodstream, is the culmination of MindImmune’s research into understanding how the immune system causes neuroinflammation that destroys synaptic connections. That research uncovered an innate immune cell – the CD11c+ cell – that is recruited from the periphery into the brain and has been shown to drive pathologic neuroinflammation. Additional work has shown that preventing the recruitment of CD11c+ cells into the brain in preclinical models stops the neuroinflammatory damage, offering a new approach for the treatment of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
About MindImmune Therapeutics
MindImmune Therapeutics is a preclinical-stage, venture-backed company launched in concert with the Ryan Institute for Neuroscience Research at the University of Rhode Island that is focused on neuroinflammation as means of addressing neurodegenerative disease. The company’s lead program – MITI-101 – seeks to inhibit deleterious immune cell recruitment from the blood into the brain in response to pathology in patients with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. This could represent a fundamental therapeutics breakthrough for the field.
Since June 2022, MindImmune has raised financing of $19.4 million. Investors participating include Dolby Family Ventures, Pfizer Ventures, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), Gates Frontier Holdings, Foundation for a Better World, Trend Venture, RightHill Ventures (an affiliate of the Slater Technology Fund) and several private investors.
Currently, MindImmune is seeking investors to advance MITI-101 into clinical development including an early read on efficacy in Alzheimer's disease. For more information, please visit: www.mindimmune.com.
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