TARGETED THERAPEUTICS FOR TYPE 1 DIABETESType 1 diabetes begins in the islet. So does our approach.
Islex Therapeutics is developing targeted approaches to type 1 diabetes focused directly on the beta cell, guided by exceptional human genetic insight.
THE PROBLEM
T1D begins with a fragile beta cell.
Type 1 diabetes destroys the cells that make insulin. Almost all of the development effort in the field aims at systemically modifying the immune system rather than at strengthening β-cells against attack.
An immune attack
The immune system learns to recognize proteins on insulin-producing β-cells and destroys them. Systemic immune modulation, the dominant strategy in the field, acts on that response throughout the body.
Strengthen the β-cell
Our technology allows us to target the β-cell and deliver a cell specific therapy, that both strengthens the β-cell to withstand inflammatory attack and reduce local causes of stress.
A cell under stress
In T1D patients, the hyper-active immune system places strong cellular stress on the β-cells. Under this inflammatory stress, they become both less functional and more visible to the immune system, which accelerates their own loss.
OUR APPROACH
Targeted at the beta cell, guided by exceptional human genetics.
Islex is pursuing a target whose expression is unusually restricted to the pancreatic beta cell. That specificity is the point. An approach aimed at this target goes where the disease is, rather than acting broadly across the body.
The rationale rests on human genetics, not animal models alone. Analyses spanning roughly 150,000 individuals across five ethnic groups, and an independent registry of approximately 100,000 more, point to the same biology. People who carry naturally occurring loss-of-function variants in this pathway show substantially lower diabetes risk, and are otherwise healthy.
Where the field goes wide,
we go narrow
THE BETA CELL IS THE SITE OF THE DISEASE
Type 1 diabetes damages a tissue that makes up a fraction of the percent of body mass. Therapies distributed throughout the body may deliver limited activity where it is actually needed.
TARGETING CHANGES THE ARITHMETIC
Targeting the islet gives us a chance to get closer to the root of type 1 diabetes, with a therapy built specifically for this disease.
A ROUTE, NOT JUST A DRUG
If an antibody reliably reaches β-cells, it may also be able to carry other payloads there. We are evaluating this possibility to expand our pipeline for T1D and broader pancreatic therapies.
WHERE WE ARE
Advancing toward the clinic.
Islex is advancing its lead program, ILX-101, through IND-enabling work and toward initial clinical studies, while building the foundation for a broader pipeline on the same underlying biology.
