Engineering Out the Immune Response: How Immunopeptidomics is De-Risking AAV Gene Therapy

The typical notion of vaccine developers is that immunopeptidomics is of little value e.g. as viral Tcell epitopes are known. Eli Lilly and Company researchers just demonstrated the contrary for Adeno-associated viruses (AAVs), which are among the most widely used delivery vectors for gene therapies.

Despite their proven utility, AAV-based genetherapiey are met with a significant immune response in patients, which impacts their efficacy.

In this study, immunopeptidomics was used to identify a novel, long AAV-derived T cell epitope that now can be engineered to reduce AAV immunogenicity and increase cellandgenetherapy effectiveness!
Great results to derisk drugdevelopment.

Epitope mapping using immunopeptidomics reveals novel immunodominant CD8 T cell epitopes of the AAV9 capsid