Tu71 - Synthekines: A Novel Platform for Combinatorial Engineering of Cytokine Receptor Agonists

Cytokines are secreted immunomodulatory proteins that activate key signaling pathways by receptor dimerization.  While many cytokines have been approved as therapeutics, native structure restricts their therapeutic potential to pathways activated by their cognate cytokine receptors.  At Synthekine we have implemented a platform to dimerize native and non-native pairs of cytokine receptors using single domain (VHH) antibodies, allowing us to design synthetic cytokine mimics that generate targeted and modulated signals on key cell types to improve on first generation cytokine therapeutics.