Status
CytoD was founded as a Meytav Incubator portfolio company in May 2008. The company focuses on developing novel and safe therapeutic for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). CytoD is applying a new principle of therapeutic action by using a very low concentration of endogenous protein (chemokine CCL2 -C-C motif- ligand 2). The company achieved “Proof Of Concept” (POC) of its lead therapeutic agent.
Sector and field of activity
Drug Development, therapy for Inflammatory and autoimmune diseases
Underlying Science and Technology
The surveillance of the body for foreign antigens is a critical function of the immune system. Naïve T lymphocytes traffic through the T cell areas of secondary lymphoid organs in search of antigen presented by dendritic cells. Upon antigen recognition, specific T cells proliferate and in the presence of polarizing cytokines, differentiate towards effector cells that produce distinct patterns of cytokines and mediate different types of protective and pathological responses. In order to enter into lymph nodes, T lymphocytes need to firmly interact with and extravasate across specialized lymph node venules, the high endothelial venules (HEVs). T-cell subsets express unique patterns of homing molecules to interact with organ-specific cells for preferential recruitment to distinct target tissues.
Autoimmune disorders are diseases caused by the body producing an inappropriate immune response against its own tissues such as inflammatory. CyToD focuses on the pathways that restrict homing of specific subsets of immune cells to their activation sites in the lymph nodes and sites of inflammation and thereby fine tune the immune response. Chemokines play an important role in lymphocyte recruitment to the lymph nodes or sites of inflammation. Our in-vitro and in vivo studies showed that low levels of chemokine such as CCL2 (at pM levels) attenuate lymphocyte chemotaxis. Our in vivo experiments results in mice models showed that pM levels of CCL2, unlike the high dose of this chemokine, can exert global suppressory effects on T cell trafficking into lymph nodes and tissues resulting in significant reduction in disease scores as demonstrated in TNBS-Induced colitis (IBD), DSS-Induced colitis (IBD), EAE (MS), Adjuvant induced Arthritis (RA) and OVA induce Asthma (Asthma). Thus, pM levels of CCL2 may be clinically effective as anti inflammatory agent which is believed to be caused by activation of mucosal T lymphocytes and in particular CD4+ T cells.
Team - Management
Dr. Shafrira Shai - CEO
Prof. Idit Shachar –Founder, R&D advisor and patent’s Inventor
Board of Directors
Ido Agmon (CEO of the Meytav Incubator)
Dr. Orit Shaked (CTO of Meytav Incubator)
Ran Nussbaum (Pontifax partner)
Dr. Shafrira Shai (CEO of CyToD)
Intellectual Property Status
Patent at the PCT stage; PCT/IL2007/000806 was filed first as a US provisional 60/832,600 filed 24.7.06/Title: Pharmaceutical compositions comprising CCL2 and use of same for the treatment of inflammation.Inventors: Prof. Idit Shachar & Dr. Liat Flaishon
