Immorta Bio is developing autologous stem cell and immunotherapy solutions to combat aging and enhance cellular regeneration.
Aging is the ultimate risk factor for many diseases marked by the progression and deterioration of organs and tissues and an enhanced risk of disease initiation. Immorta Bio‘s technologies aim to leverage the power of the body’s own young stem cells and its own enhanced immune cells to deal with cancers as well as the diseases of aging just the way your body dealt with them when it was younger and healthier.
Longevity.Technology: Personalized cellular therapies are becoming a significant focal point for the longevity industry, so we sat down with Dr Thomas Ichim, President and CSO of Immorta Bio to find out more about its approach and its potential for extending human healthspan, the use of autologous cells, and the significance of senolytic immunotherapy in rejuvenating the immune system.
Cellular therapy has been around for some time – bone marrow transplantation, for example, has been around for several decades. And while it works, Ichim explains there are still some challenges to be overcome.
“It is still graft versus host disease; when you transplant blood-making stem cells from the donor to the recipient, the graft attacks the host, and we still have not solved that,” Ichim says. “On the one hand, we do know that cell therapy works, and hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved from bone marrow transplants, but on the other hand, we still have some major hurdles to overcome because we still do not have an ability to transplant into people effectively and reproducibly.”
This is why Immorta has focused on using the patient’s own cells – autologous cells.
“The problem with cell therapy in general is when somebody else’s cells are used, like in bone marrow transplants for leukemia, you have the risk of graft versus host, or when you use other cells, such as umbilical cord mesenchymal cells, you see a therapeutic effect, but it is dependent on the host cells – it’s still allogeneic because it is from somebody younger,” Ichim explains. “The therapeutic responses are dependent on what the endogenous regenerative capacity of the recipient is.”
The solution, he explains, is to take an autologous approach – and, says Ichim, it is an approach that can generate “beautiful data”. “If you use your own cells, in some cases, you can get the cells to differentiate into other organs.”
Ichim references BioHeart who demonstrated autologous regenerative cells going through dead myocardium, but explains getting enough cells for therapy can be tricky.
“As people age, the number of stem cells in the bone marrow decreases with age and also the quality of stem cells decreases. So we said to ourselves: ‘Why not generate autologous cells from the patient – but generate an everlasting supply?’”
Immorta aims to do this with iPSC technology, generating pluripotent immortal stem cells from the recipient’s blood. “We will expand these cells to have a bank, and then from that bank, we will be able to draw different tissues as needed.”
Ichim acknowledges that this technology is years away from realization, so Immorta is also looking at indications that can be treated with autologous derived cells created on its StemCell Revivify platform.
Dr Thomas Ichim, President and CSO of Immorta Bio
“Our initial indication in the cellular rejuvenation space is liver failure and we have other indications in the pipeline – we believe cell therapy is the best way because all problems are initiated at a cellular level and the cells know how to treat the body better than we do.”
Immorta’s SenoVax platform centers around senolytic immunotherapy, and leverages the patient’s own dendritic cells, generated from the patient’s blood and skin punch biopsy, to create precision targeted immune cells that enhance the body’s innate ability to self-heal.
Ultimately, this immunotherapy is autologous dendritic cells pulsed with autologous patient derived senescent cells. SenoVax has demonstrated positive data in lung, skin, breast, pancreatic and brain cancer preclinical animal models, and has potential applicability in organ rejuvenation as well
“Part of the immune system’s role is to kill senescent cells, but the senolytic ability of the immune system decreases with age. In addition, cancer tumors can cause acceleration of senescence due to their ability to produce all these inflammatory growth factors, and the senescent cells, because they produce the senescence-associated secretory phenotype proteins, help the tumor to grow and to hide from the immune system. The senescent cells act as an ultimate checkpoint, but we are immunizing against this.”
Ichim explains that Immorta Bio anticipates that, pending FDA approval, this senolytic immunotherapy will have the potential to be used as an antiaging therapy in the future.
“We have observed synergy between our senolytic immunotherapy and administration of cellular rejuvenation in the liver using carbon tetrachloride as a liver failure model, and we’ve shown that if you decrease the number of senescent cells, you can actually increase engraftment and activity of the progenitor cells.”
Ichim points to a paper by Kirkland et al that suggests the body has an innate regenerative desire that is suppressed and tempered by the presence of senescent cells.
“Kirkland showed that using dasatinib you can increase grip strength in the mouse, the ability to turn on the treadmill, all sorts of different things. We believe that we’re going to be seeing very similar activities – the differences that we’re inducing are revamping the body’s innate ability to kill senescent cells. We think we have a really interesting way of approaching this issue of senescence, which we see as inhibition. Once we clear the senescence, our big picture then is to put regenerative cells for a big overall.”
When it comes to scaling the technology, Ichim explains that a conventional hurdle of the implementation of cell therapy has been cost.
“When you expand the cells more, you have less efficacy. And that has always been a big problem in our industry – how do you reduce the costs? There are solutions like chemically induced retro differentiation or combining different technologies. Part of our patent filings, which are going to be published soon, uses genetic manipulation, but we also leverage chemical-based approaches to increase the efficiency of our production of these cells.
“In healthcare, what we have is the opposite of Moore’s Law. Whereas in Moore’s Law, everything doubles, in healthcare, the more money you put in, the less progress there is. And I believe that one of the reasons is because as a society we have just focused on searching for a magic bullet. We believe there are no magic bullets. We believe you have to look at the body in a holistic manner, and cell therapy is a very important part of that.”
Ichim says that long term, Immorta Bio is focused on being a collaborator and a licensor.
“We anticipate entering into licensing deals relatively quickly as this technology advances,” he explains. “Basically, we focus on what we do best, which is come up with ideas and advance them into the clinic. And then as they get into the clinic, we want to use strategic partners. The long-term picture is right now we’re dealing with cells. Eventually, we want to be able to plug these cells into different situations, even into the three-dimensional organs. The other area is autologous iPSC dopaminergic cells. We hope to see our technology basically being able to be plug and play – used by multiple companies and our tech becoming faster and cheaper as a result, and creating personalized regenerative cells.”
Main photograph credit: DC_Studio/Envato. Photograph of Dr Ichim courtesy of Immorta Bio