# A new modality: Antibodies as prevention | InvVax

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/171251
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:171251
- Published at: 2024-03-02 19:18:59 UTC
- Updated at: 2025-07-09 03:24:33 UTC

## Author
Arthur Young

## Subject
InvVax

## Content
Announcing solid progress toward our goal!Hello everyone,We're pleased to report substantial progress on our stable prophylactic antibodies (spAbs) work!As you might know, we received funding from the National Science Foundation just over two years ago to work on a project which is only tangentially related to our vaccine work, but is arguably the most exciting work in our pipeline. Namely, we are designing an antibody (Ab) backbone that is so extremely stable that our Abs can be given prophylactically, i.e. as a preventative intervention to guard against almost any infectious disease - such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, influenza, the common cold, etc. You might have heard of Regeneron's therapeutic Ab for COVID-19. The difference is that we want to give our spAbs as prevention, not as treatment. A parent bringing her infant to a well-baby pediatric visit will be able to choose from a "menu" of infectious diseases that she would like her child to be protected again, protection which could last a decade or more, or possibly even a lifetime. Someone who is already an adult when our spAbs hit the market can choose to be protected from these diseases as well. We could be on to something that might be classified as a whole new medical modality, up there with chemotherapy, vaccines, surgery, and psychotherapy.As we draw our Phase 1 funding to a close, we pause to reflect on where we have gotten the past two years. In fact, we just submitted our Phase 2 grant (if awarded, will be $1M, and the acceptance rate is 40%), and in advance of the deadline I've been working 14-hour days to try to cram in as much experimental data as humanly possible by the end of February. I'm happy to say that we've discovered a panel of mutations that make our Ab resistant to several Ab-degrading proteases that contribute to elimination of Abs in vivo. That, in addition to engineering resistance to other proteases which we replicated from published work, our Ab should now be quite fortified against natural turnover in the circulation. We've also discovered a couple of mutations that make Ab bind better to a molecule called the neonatal Fc receptor, or FcRn. FcRn stabilizes Abs in the circulation, so a stronger affinity of the Ab to FcRn will give it a longer lifetime in vivo as well. We're well on our way toward our goal, and should we receive the Phase 2 grant (even if we don't, we'll pull in funds from elsewhere), we'll do a powerful screen in monkeys for additional mutations that extend the Ab lifespan in vivo. If we can achieve our ambitious goal of attaining a half-life (the time it takes for the Ab's level to be cut in half) in vivo of years to decades, we will have successfully arrived upon spAbs. You might be able to tell your children and grandchildren that you heard of spAbs here first!Keep your eyes peeled for more updates on this front! And as always, if you'd like to invest, you can go to our Wefunder page here:https://wefunder.com/invvax/ask