The University College London (UCL) spin-out heads consortium to develop new antibody medicine.

Nanomerics is heading a consortium of academia and industry in an attempt to deliver new antibodies through the blood-brain barrier, using the company’s molecular envelope technology. The technology allows delivery of previously undeliverable drugs to the brain. The consortium also includes the Danish pharmaceutical company H Lundbeck, University College London (UCL), and Exeter University. 

The potential new treatments would focus on conditions such as dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and brain cancer. The collaboration, which will last three years, is being funded by the UK government’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which has awarded the project just over £1m ($1.67m) through its Health Impact Partnerships scheme.

The partnership is aiming to overcome current barriers which make it exceptionally difficult for antibodies to be used to treat brain disease, at a time when they are becoming more widespread, with half a million sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease in the UK alone. The rise is due to Europe’s aging population. Current antibody medicines are expensive and, once they are in the bloodstream, cannot cross the blood vessels in the brain to get to the brain tissue.  This inability to access the brain is due to their large size and good solubility in the blood.

Nanomerics uses proprietary pharmaceutical nanotechnology and know-how developed by the founding scientists Ijeoma Uchegbu and Andreas Schätzlein over the last 14 years at the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow and, latterly at the UCL School of Pharmacy.

Ijeoma Uchegbu, chief scientific officer at Nanomerics and professor of pharmaceutical nanoscience at UCL, said: “This collaboration will bolster our efforts to deliver effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological diseases to patients. Overcoming the barrier to delivering medicines into the brain will go a huge way to delivering such treatments and improving the quality of life of many millions of sufferers worldwide.”