Protein Engineering for Reduced Immunogenicity

Dr Tomer Hertz and Dr Amir Aharoni of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, discusses their new approach for therapeutic protein de-immunization, reducing ADA's, whilst still preserving drug efficacy. Their strategy focuses on combining computational and experimental immunology with protein engineering. Their case study on Adalimumab (Humira) and Ipilimumab shows how their method of first identifying the potential immunogenic CD4 hotspots on the drug by computational methods, and then secondly using Yeast Surface Display protein engineering to eliminate these hotspots but maintain the WT activity by using a high throughput screening approach, results in a still active but less immunogenic variant.