Dr. Sam Sanderson, Research Associate Professor in UNMC’s Pharmaceutical Sciences department, recently received a $2.25 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Sanderson is working to develop a therapeutic that you might be able to use to target and activate your own natural host defenses to fight bacterial infections.
Sanderson says when he applied for the grant he proposed studying and improving a small peptide he and his team developed a few years ago, called EP67.
He says EP67 is a tiny fragment that comes from a natural protein component of an individual’s immune system.
He modified it structurally and chemically and has demonstrated EP67’s ability to be activated, engaged and used in a population of a person’s immune cells that act as the first line of defense against infection.
"What’s important about this is we can do that at the expense of inflammatory side effects. So the protein that this little peptide EP67 was generated from does what its parent protein typically does, which is to activate these cellular elements of innate immunity. But unlike the parent protein, we do not activate the inflammatory cells.”
He says EP67 doesn’t target the bacteria itself.
"What we are targeting is your own natural, innate immune responses and the cellular components involved in that. And those cellular responses, they’re all activated and ready to rock and roll. And it doesn’t matter to your innate immune response whether the bacterial infection is antibiotic-resistant or not, it’s just something that had not to be there and we are going to clear it out.”
Sanderson says typical antibiotics directly interact and kill bacteria but the problem is, this constant assault has led to bacteria developing evasive mechanisms to get around the effect of the antibiotics.
He says the result is more worldwide antibiotic-resistant infections in humans.
Sanderson says the grant money will allow him and his team to file EP67 as an Investigation New Drug with the FDA as well as work on product development.
He says his startup company Prommune has already tested EP67’s potential against H1N1 and is looking at its effectiveness against certain parasitic infections.
For more information, the website is unmc.edu/research.