Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Peter Traber is the Chief Medical officer at Selecta Biosciences, which is enabling and increasing the effectiveness of gene therapy by inhibiting the body's immune response. Their drug platform ImmTOR is a nano-encapsulated immunomodulatory drug that causes the immune system to be tolerant of antigens and inhibits the immune response. This approach may overcome an important hurdle in gene therapy and biologic therapy by allowing repeated dosing. Peter explains, "Our immune response is very robust, and it's hard to get around it. So in order to make these therapies, either proteins or gene therapy, more effective and safer, we are tolerizing the individual to those therapies with this platform." "So I'll give you an example from our phase three program in chronic refractory gout. We're using an enzyme to treat refractory gout, which decreases the uric acid, but it's a yeast-derived enzyme. It's an enzyme that humans don't have, and therefore it's highly immunogenic. If you give it to a human, it's only ef