Press release  

• Curing diabetes with the help of sugars 
• Immune cell targeting restoring tolerance in type 1 diabetes mellitus 

DC4U was recently awarded a 2,7 million euro valued Eurostars project for the development a next-generation allergy vaccine to treat grass-pollen induced allergic rhinitis and asthma. In this project DC4U and its partners UMCG, Fraunhofer Institute, Pharmacelsus, piCHEM and Allergopharma will develop an allergen specific immune therapy based on DC4U’s GlycoDC technology.

DC4U was recently awarded a 2,5 million euro valued Eurostars project for the development a an innovative therapeutic vaccine for Multiple Sclerosis. In this project DC4U and its partners VUmc, piCHEM, University of Bern and MD Biosciences will develop an antigen specific immune therapy based on DC4U’s GlycoDC technology.

DC4U was recently awarded a NanoNextNL project aiming to create glycan-antigen based technologies, which can be applied to develop novel nanomedicines. In this project, “Nanoparticles Targeting Dendritic Cells for Anti-Tumor Vaccines”, we cooperate with VU Medical Centre, Leiden University Medical Centre, U-Protein Express and Podiceps.
The project focuses on developing multivalent glyco-peptide conjugates and glycoliposome formulations using defined tumor antigens that have shown clinical responses.  These nano glycan-antigen constructs will significantly enhance tumor antigen specific immune responses by targeting of dendritic cells.

NanoNextNL is a consortium of more than one hundred companies, universities, knowledge institutes and university medical centres, which is aimed at research into micro and nanotechnology. The total sum involved for NanoNextNL is 250 million euros, half of which is contributed by the collaborations and the other half by the Government of the Netherlands.

The group of Van Kooyk and colleagues recently published the review “Glycan-based DC-SIGN targeting vaccines to enhance antigen cross-presentation” in Molecular Immunology.

The review describes the current and future directions of glycan based targeting strategies used to improve anti-tumor responses by targeting multivalent glycan-antigen formulations to Dendritic Cells.