Alpioner Therapeutics

Alpioner Therapeutics is developing a whole-cell vaccine platform called KBMA which is originally coming from the joint Université Grenoble-Alpes and CNRS TIMC Labs (Laboratoire en recherche Translationnelle et Innovation en Médecine et Complexité). Killed But Metabolically Active vaccines are based on bacterial nucleotide excision repair mutants and are inactivated by photochemical treatment with a synthetic highly reactive psoralen. Deletion of the uvr gene AB, coding for exonucleases, renders bacteria sensitive to ultraviolet light–induced DNA damage and to psoralen-induced crosslinks.

The KBMA vaccine approach is based on the hypothesis that in the Uvr mutant strains this photochemical inactivation leaves intact the ability of inactivated bacteria to express its genes, while preventing replication and the ability to cause disease in the immunized host. Thus, the early events in the natural infection are unaffected, which facilitates the induction of an innate and adaptive immune response comparable to that induced by the live pathogen.

Alpioner Therapeutics is developing a KBMA vaccine candidate against a gram-negative pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa3.