Micacide™ Proteins

AvidBiotics’ Micacide™ proteins represent a new class of therapeutics that mobilize the innate immunity system to efficiently detect and destroy cancerous or virus infected cells.

The innate immunity system plays an important role in fighting cancer and viral infection by maintaining constant surveillance against cells that express surface proteins MICA or MICB, whose presence indicates that the cells are a threat. Once NK cells, for example, detect a cell decorated by a MIC protein, they attack and destroy it. However, many cancerous or infected cells do not express a level of MICA sufficient to recruit the cells of the innate immunity system, or the harmful cells develop a strategy that enables them to hide or shed their MICA surface markers.

Micacide proteins are designed to overcome the escape of these malignant or infected cells from NK and T cell surveillance. They bind soluble MICA via a specifically engineered adapter to targeted molecules that are uniquely expressed on a cancer or virus-infected cell’s surface. In doing so, the Micacide proteins decorate the harmful cells with MICA and flag them for destruction by NK and T cells.  AvidBiotics’ protein engineering technology provides the means of generating a diversity of highly specific targeting domains that can be used as the adapters for specific cancer or infected cells.

AvidBiotics believes its Micacide protein platform has the potential to be even more effective than antibody-based approaches that activate the cellular immune response. Moreover, this approach could provide opportunities to develop therapies against diseases that are not readily addressed by antibodies or vaccines.