Technology Platforms

SupraAntigen™ Platform
AC Immune's SupraAntigen™ technology platform provides the ability to break the immune tolerance to "self" proteins by generating conformation-sensitive antibodies that lead to the creation of active and passive immune therapies. This platform technology has been developed by Prof. Claude Nicolau, one of the scientific founders of the company (scientific publications).

The key advantages of the SupraAntigen™ platform are the highly selective mechanism of immune response, which is T-cell independent, and the unique specificity of the immune response. The technology can be used as the ultimate mimetics of pathological conformation of the antigen allowing rapid development of both vaccines and monoclonal antibodies even with weak immunogenic targets.

With Abeta as a first target, AC Immune has successfully developed two Immunotherapies with the SupraAntigen™ platform that are now in clinical development for the treatment of Alzheimer´s disease: the anti-Abeta antibody for passive Immunization as well as the therapeutic vaccine ACI-24 for active Immunotherapy.

Morphomer™ Platform
This platform focuses on the chemistry of small molecules, Morphomers™, which are non-covalent complexes of small molecules with particular sequences of the target proteins. They occur in different conformational states and create drugs capable of targeting and modifying the conformational state of targeted proteins and render them harmless. Thesmall  molecules are designed to selectively bind to aggregated amyloid targets and highly effectively solubilize Abeta-oligomers and have excellent biophysical properties for CNS compounds.

Therapies developed through the Morphomer™ platform are currently in pre-clinical development for Alzheimer´s Disease and other conformational diseases based on Abeta such as Glaucoma. The chemistry platform is currently extended to Tau as a second target molecule.