Manipulating cytokine responses with engineered surrogate ligands
Cytokines are keystone regulators of the immune response. They exhibit pleiotropic activities that allow them to control every immune cell activity as well as fate. The same pleiotropic activities that make them such efficient immune-regulators have also hindered our understanding of cytokine biology and their translation into the clinic. A given cytokine can exert different activities in different cell types, making it very difficult to pinpoint specific effects resulting from its manipulation or deregulation.
We plan to engineer a large array of surrogate cytokine ligands with the ability to fine-tune signaling responses downstream of a cytokine receptor and to decouple functional pleiotropy exhibited by cytokines. We envision that these ligands will change the way that we currently treat human diseases.