Stellabody^®

Improving the efficacy of cancer, inflammation and infectious disease treatments.

Therapeutic antibody technologies have revolutionised treatments across a spectrum of diseases including cancer, infectious diseases and autoimmunity. However, these treatments have hit a natural potency ceiling as unmodified antibodies, as they occur in nature, do not aggressively engage the immune system. This means unmodified ‘natural’ mAbs are limited in their effectiveness as treatments for eliminating disease cells or for communicating with cells.  

Stellabody^® hexamer technology breaks through these limitations. It’s a transformative discovery that makes use of the multifunctional application of antibodies to disease but dramatically improves the potency of these antibodies and antibody-like biologics. This leads to the creation of function-enhanced therapeutics for the treatment of cancer, inflammation and infection. 

The technology is a change to the Fc tail of antibodies which exploits their natural behaviour, resulting in the formation of hexameric clusters of the antibodies after they bind to their target.

These Stellabody^® hexamers are the ideal launching pad for potently firing immune effector systems or to amplify communication signals to cells. Stellabody^® enables antibodies to kill disease targets by the complement system and can communicate cancer cells to initiate a cell death process called apoptosis. 

The need

The development of antibody and biological therapies has two key challenges: 

1. Monoclonal antibodies and their antibody-like cousins, such as Fc fusion proteins, are potential biological medicines that will readily target cancers, inflammatory cells or microbes but often have insufficient potency and lack efficacy.  
2. Existing antibody therapeutics come with limitations and don’t work for all patients. 

Molecular engineering is needed to: 

• develop new and powerful next-generation therapeutic antibodies.  
• overcome limitations of existing antibody therapeutics to broaden their use to new treatments 
• reach hard-to-treat patient populations. 

This is where Stellabody® technology comes in. 

The technology

Stellabody^® hexamer technology was discovered in the Immune Therapies group at Burnet Institute, a globally recognised laboratory in this field. 

Professor Hogarth has researched antibodies, their effector functions and roles in immunity and inflammation for over 30 years.

How it works

Stellabody^® hexamer technology works by exploiting the normal biology of antibodies and drives them into formation clusters of six antibodies (hexameric clusters) once they have bound to their target e.g. cancer cell. 

Just as flags help in co-ordinated attacks on battlefields, Stellabody® 'on-target' hexamers communicate a powerful danger pattern to the immune system to initiate effector responses to kill targets.   

Molecular patterns are important beyond the function of the immune system. Communication by patterns is a fundamental property of cells and this often occurs through cell surface receptors. In an alternative application, the Stellabody^® hexamer pattern can communicate the amplification of the signals of mAbs binding cell surface receptors.  

Either way, by communicating with immune effector functions or through cell surface receptors, Stellabody^® hexamers confer potent actions on antibody or antibody-like biologicals.

Use cases

Stellabody® is a powerful and versatile technology adaptable to multiple antibody formats against a broad range of targets, with applications in a wide range of disease settings across cancer, inflammation and infectious disease.