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.

Redbiotec

Redbiotec is a small company located near Zurich spun out from ETH in 2006 by Christian Schaub and Dr. Corinne John and is focused on developing vaccines (currently their pipeline is all preclinical).

Redbiotec develops virus-like particles (VLPs) which are non-replicating and allow surface protein expression, thus making them very useful as vaccines. Redbiotec constructs the VLPs using a co-expression system. Usually when proteins are expressed in the lab a one-promoter one-protein one-plasmid system is used. If you want to express several proteins together you can try to find enough plasmids which are compatible or you can try and put all the proteins into one plasmid. I have done multi-expression before, using a promoter and an IRES sequence in E. coli and it worked very well.

The Redbiotec system is based on the MultiBac system developed at ETH and you can express up to 10 different proteins with specific promoters (doesn't look like a system that utilizes IRES so it could probably be better controlled). It is based on the baculovirus expression system where protein is expressed in insect cells. One thing that isn't really detailed is what exactly goes into the virus like particle. Can the system express membrane bound proteins and are they working on this? Some of the viruses they are developing vaccines for are enveloped.

Redbiotec is funded in part by the venture capitalist group Redalpine. I see that the 3D microculture company InSphero I wrote about earlier is also funded by Redalpine. In addition to their own vaccine pipeline, Redbiotec also partners with other pharma and biotech companies. They describe their work in three general areas, vaccines, using the VLPs to help cancer therapeutics and to develop VLPs that express targets for antibody engineering.