InflammaGut: a drug-screenable co-culture system using gut-associated lymphocytes and autologous primary human gut epithelium that reports inflammation

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Project Summary A broad range of inflammatory gastrointestinal conditions impact millions of people in the United States and abroad. The etiology of the disease is multifactorial and heterogeneous, but the common underlying feature is an overactive immune system. Genetics, environmental factors, age, sex, race and even the composition of bacteria that reside in the gut lumen are associated with causation of gut inflammation. While some therapeutic advances have been made, a large number of patients do not respond to existing pharmaceutical interventions leaving many to have life-long morbidity. This provides strong rationale to improve existing therapies and discover alternative and novel approaches to deal with inflammatory conditions of the gut. Preclinical models used for drug research and discovery have been historically poor. They are comprised cancer cells that have low physiological relevance and do not possess the immune cell compartment, which is a missing pivotal component to achieve an accurate model of human inflammatory conditions. For these reasons, there is a need in the therapeutics marketplace for an in vitro intestinal platform that accurately recapitulates luminal-epithelial- immune cell axis of the intestines. To meet this need, Altis Biosystems Inc., an early-stage biotechnology company, has collaborated with scientists at academic laboratories to develop a novel, primary-stem cells-based, in vitro intestinal model (termed RepliGut). We have finished an SBIR Phase I program focused on transgenesis and gene editing of intestinal stem cells (ISCs) cultured on RepliGut. We developed reporter-gene ISCs that generate differentiated epithelium and sense and report in real-time key features of gut inflammation, 1) barrier function, and 2) NF-kB activation. Here we expand the scope to generate a first-in-kind co-culture model called, InflammaGutTM. InflammaGut is a tripartite and flexible system that uses fundamental technology of RepliGut and superimposes inflammation reporter genes and co-culture of human epithelium with allogeneic gut-associated lymphocytes (GAL) to recreate the LEI-axis. Four products are envisioned: 1) InflammaGut:ZO1 and InflammaGut:NF-kB reporter gene epithelium, 2) InflammaGut:Co-Culture: an epithelial/gut-associate lymphocyte (GAL) co-culture system, 3) commercializable human gut-associated lymphocytes, and 4) a new contract research service (CRS) using InflammaGut. There is strong engineering and biological method innovation, including, 1) development of Transwell insert enabling scalable culture of RepliGut differentiated human epithelium over a hydrogel encapsulated lymphoid-cell compartment, and 2) isolation, culture, and cryobanking of GAL from human organ donors. InflammaGut will be built, validated, and tested by academic collaborators (founders of the RepliGut technology), Altis Biosystems, and two industry collaborators. 1