Anergis

Anergis was founded by Professor Francois Spertini (a professor at UNIL, another Lausanne University) in 2001. It is located in the new technology park Biopole, in Lausanne (in the French side of Switzerland). Anergis is developing an improvement on SIT, Specific Immunotherapy. SIT is an allergy treatment that works by developing immune tolerance in the patient through vaccination with increasing doses of the problem allergen. SIT usually takes several years and many vaccinations because the allergen dose must be below a critical threshold where an allergic reaction would be generated.

Anergis is attempting to improve SIT through the use of peptides. Rather than immunizing with the entire protein, they immunize with peptides which cover the length of the entire protein. Anergis claims that with the peptide therapeutic, they do not invoke an allergic response and so can use higher doses of allergen in the therapy. A higher dose makes immune tolerance develop faster and so Anergis claims they can perform SIT within months instead of years. Anergis has just started in phase II of clinical trails for their vaccine developed against Birch.