Immune Control is the leader in the emerging field of serotonin-based immunotherapeutics.

Serotonin is an important neurotransmitter -- drugs targeting serotonin receptors in the central nervous system are among the most widely prescribed and commercially successful therapies worldwide.

Only recently have scientists begun to understand the vital role serotonin plays in the immune system. A rapidly growing body of evidence indicates that activated immune cells depend upon serotonin to survive. Prof. Brad Jameson at Drexel University demonstrated this by showing that serotonin receptor antagonists inhibit proliferation and induce apoptosis of activated T- and B-cells in cell culture. Subsequently, Immune Control has discovered that certain serotonin receptors on immune cells are important regulators of the inflammatory response, allowing the company to design and develop compounds that target these receptors.

Immune Control has created a library of new chemical entities designed to be orally available, not to enter the central nervous system, and to block specific serotonin receptors. Many of these drug candidates are designed to interfere with immunologically mediated processes, such as airway hyper-responsiveness in asthma, or destruction of cartilage and bone in rheumatoid arthritis. Other compounds act in the cardiovascular system to inhibit serotonin receptors in diseases such as pulmonary artery hypertension, a life-threatening disease in which up-regulated serotonin receptors on vascular smooth muscle cells have been shown to play a major role in vasoconstriction and thickening of the muscular layer in pulmonary arterioles. Using in vitro and in vivo screens, we have identified multiple drug candidates with potent activities in standard animal disease models for asthma, pulmonary arterial hypertension, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Our preclinical development program is aimed at introducing safe and effective oral agents into the clinic that will be convenient to administer and will affect only the subset of immune cells responsible for autoimmune destruction.

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Immune Control’s technology addresses limitations of current therapies for autoimmune, hematologic cancers, and organ transplant rejection.

Autoimmune diseases are caused by inappropriately activated immune cells. Traditional therapies are typically directed toward the symptoms, not the immune cells that are the underlying problem. Current autoimmune therapies are thus merely palliative. Hematologic cancer therapies, such as chemotherapy or radiation often damage all dividing cells. Organ transplant therapies broadly suppress the entire immune, impair immune defenses, and increase the risk of infection.

Immune Control’s technology has the potential to target only the inappropriately activated immune cells, leaving non-activated immune cells that comprise the vast majority of immune cells, unaffected. In this way, the root cause of these conditions can be addressed without broad, indiscriminant injury to the rest of the immune system.

Immune Control aggressively pursues worldwide patent protection for its technologies.

Currently, we own, or license exclusively, eight patents and patent applications that are directed toward: the use of any serotonin antagonist to modulate the immune response; the use of any immunomodulatory drug if that drug operates via an immune serotonin receptor; novel compounds that kill dividing lymphocytes, or are effective in a variety of auto-immune diseases; novel serotonin receptors that are important in auto-immune diseases, or are characteristic of immune cells; novel serotonin antagonists that do not cross the blood-brain barrier; and novel uses of approved anti-depressants and anti-psychotics as immunomodulatory drugs.