AC Immune SA is a Nasdaq-listed biopharmaceutical company which aims to become a global leader in precision medicine for neurodegenerative diseases. Precision medicine relies on a detailed diagnosis of the patient to first identify the pathological proteins that cause the disease. This approach enables targeted therapy improving the odds of treatment success.
In order to cover the full spectrum from prevention to the advanced clinical stage, the Company pursues three innovative therapeutic approaches with “best-in-class” potential: vaccines, antibodies and orally available small molecules for neurodegenerative diseases caused by misfolding of proteins. The candidates specifically target the pathological forms of brain proteins and dissolve resulting protein aggregates and/or inhibit their formation or spreading.
The Company also develops precision medicine-enabling diagnostics to identify patients early and reliably. These unique diagnostic possibilities allow a treatment-oriented selection of patients in clinical studies as well as custom-tailoring of the optimal therapy or combination of therapies. Diagnosis at an early stage, before symptoms of cognitive decline appear, would allow slowing or interrupting the progression of the pathology, thus enabling Alzheimer’s prevention.
AC Immune’s product pipeline consists of nine therapeutic and three diagnostic product candidates, six of which are in clinical development: the anti-Abeta antibody, crenezumab, the anti-Tau antibody, semorinemab, the anti-Abeta vaccine ACI-24, the anti-Tau vaccine ACI-35.030, MorphomerTM Tau aggregation inhibitors and the Tau-PET tracer PI-2620. These clinical programs focus primarily on the indication Alzheimer’s disease and the pathological proteins Abeta and Tau. Several proprietary therapeutic and diagnostic candidates in preclinical development are targeting the novel targets alpha-synuclein, TDP-43 and the inflammasome, expanding the product pipeline to include Alzheimer’s co-pathologies and other neurodegenerative diseases. The Company has collaborations with major pharmaceutical companies such as Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, Eli Lilly and Company and Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
Platform potential:
AC Immune uses two proprietary, clinically validated technology platforms, SupraAntigenTM and MorphomerTM, to generate therapeutic and diagnostic product candidates that specifically bind only the pathological proteins.
The key advantages of the biological SupraAntigen™ platform are the highly selective mechanism of immune response, which is T-cell independent, and the unique specificity of the immune response. The technology can be used as the ultimate mimetics of pathological conformation of the antigen allowing rapid development of both vaccines and monoclonal antibodies even with weak immunogenic targets.
The chemical Morphomer™ platform focuses on the development of conformation-specific small molecules with excellent biophysical properties for CNS compounds. This technology allows the design of molecules that bind with high specificity to aggregated targets and dissolve them very effectively.