About Immunitrack

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About Immunitrack

About Immunitrack

Immunitrack provides a complete product and service pipeline to optimize immunogenicity assessments during drug development, as well as a broad portfolio of reagents to monitor patient CD8 and CD4 T cell responses to lead drug candidates during early R&D and clinical trials.

How Can Immunitrack Help R&D?

The Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) is critical to the immune response. Immunitrack has world-leading expertise in the manufacture and application of MHC I and II molecules and peptides to accurately study MHC epitope binding through our proprietary NeoScreen platform.

Major Areas of Application

Immuno-oncology: selection and study of neo-epitopes for personalized cancer vaccine development.
Vaccine development: selection of immunogenic epitopes from viral and bacterial targets.
De-immunisation: reduce the risk of anti-drug antibody development by identifying and removing CD4 T cell epitopes in candidate biologics.
TCR Off-Target: de-risking candidate TCR and TCR-like therapies.

Reagents

We produce customized MHC tetramers and peptides to detect and quantify subsets of patient immune (T) cells with specificity towards a given antigen within blood samples.

All of our MHC I reagents are biotinylated and produced on our optimized manufacturing platform, and we guarantee 100% peptide loading of each complex.

Binding Assays

Our unique NeoScreen platform combines more than a decade of world-leading expertise in MHC/epitope binding assays with a high level of automation. The result is a highly scalable and accurate high throughput platform that can screen thousands of (neo-)epitopes for affinity and stability.

Depending on the desired immune response our clients can then select and progress the best candidates through therapeutic development. Our repository is continuously growing, and currently holds more than 70 different MHC I and 20 MHC II alleles.

The Immunitrack History

Our company builds on more than twelve years of experience in performing and optimizing in vitro MHC/epitope binding assays for MHC I and MHC II.

Co-founder and Immunitrack CSO, Sune Justesen, was in charge of developing one of the largest in vitro assay platforms for measuring peptide binding to MHC ever developed. The platform was used to perform a total of 200,000 Kd measurements on 150 MHC alleles. The data was then used to develop the allele-specific predictor NetMHC allele-specific prediction software, still widely used in immune system analysis.

Since its founding in 2013, Immunitrack has developed its unique NeoScreen platform, providing researchers with a better tool for assessing the immunogenicity of epitopes.

The Immunitrack Mission

Immunitrack’s mission is to provide the pharmaceutical industry and research community with tailor made technology and reagents to select or redesign drug candidates during early R&D and to monitor the effects of lead drug candidates on patient immune responses.

Management Team

Karin Absalonsen
Chairman of the Board

Karin holds a Master of Law from University of Aarhus. She has more than 25 years of extensive experience in corporate law and M&A from her work as business lawyer and partner in Nyborg & Rørdam Law Firm. For the past 15+ years Karin has worked with particular focus on the life science industry including biotech start-ups. She has participated in numerous national and international transactions, exits deals, seed and venture capital financing rounds and licensing deals. Karin is also an experienced negotiator and skilled in business development and strategy. She has strong board experience from board positions in several biotech companies over time.

Sune Justensen PhD
Chief Scientific Officer

Sune Justensen founded Immunitrack together with Stephan Thorgrimsen in 2013. A civil engineer from the Technical University of Denmark, Sune later completed a PhD as well as postdoctoral training in one of the world’s leading groups within major histocompatibility complexes (MHC) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Sune is a world-leading expert in MHC, a family of receptors that are central to the immune response. During his research career, he devised novel ways to produce functional MHC molecules and analyse MHC-epitope interactions through a range of unique assays. This groundbreaking work positioned his then research group as a global leader in the MHC field and simultaneously led to the technology upon which Immunitrack is founded.

Stephan Thorgrimsen PhD
Chief Executive Officer

Stephan Thorgrimsen is one of Immunitrack’s two co-founders. He holds a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and he authored or co-authored numerous peer-reviewed articles during his research career. In 2013, Stephan completed an MBA from the prestigious Copenhagen Business School and cofounded Immunitrack where he currently is the CEO.

Scientific Advisors

Frederik Bagger
PhD

Frederik Otzen Bagger holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark (2015). With postdoctoral experience from EMBL-EBI and the University of Cambridge, he has gained extensive experience within the ‘omics’ techniques, data analysis, and deep learning with a focus on interpretable models. He has authored or co-authored more than 35 published peer-reviewed articles in the past 5 years, and his work is highly-cited. He is currently employed as a senior researcher at the Department of Genomic Medicine, Copenhagen State Hospital. He is also founder and consultant at Fobinf ApS. Additional credentials include: SinaPlot (inventor), BloodSpot.eu (founder) and HemaExplorer (founder).

Dr. Derin Keskin
PhD

Derin possesses a deep knowledge of MHC molecules and their involvement within immune-oncology as well as strong experience in the development of better MHC/epitope predictors. Derin and his team have also developed technologies to isolate and sequence single tumor-infiltrating T cells to clone T-cell receptor alpha-beta pairs and determine their epitope specificity. He’s currently the Lead Immunologist at the Translational Immuno-Genomics Laboratory, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. Derin has 80 publications in reputed journals and has made significant contributions to science, with some of his notable ones being an epitope prediction software, HLAthena, that was developed by Derin and his colleagues.