Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) caused a pandemic with millions of infections and deaths worldwide and devastating impact on global economy. Up to now, vaccines and monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapies lack to provide a long-lasting protection against rapidly evolving new emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. Thus, novel therapeutic options are pressingly needed especially for immunocompromised patients and/or patients with high risk for developing a severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
In that regard, we developed a novel immunotherapeutic drug based on the SARS-CoV-2 entry receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). This ACE2 decoy potently binds to the SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain (RBD), neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 as well as the Delta and Omicron variant and protects hamsters from a SARS-CoV-2 infection. To additionally use this ACE2 decoy for elimination of virus infected cells, we equipped it with an epitope tag. Thus, it can be applied as adapter molecule in the modular platform technologies UniMAB and UniCAR, which already demonstrated great success in the setting of malignant diseases. As adapter molecule the ACE2 decoy is able to efficiently recruit either universal chimeric antigen receptor (UniCAR) modified T cells or, in combination with an anti-peptide epitope-anti-CD3 bispecific Ab of the UniMAB system, unmodified T cells to efficiently kill SARS-CoV-2 RBD expressing human cells.
Taken together, the ACE2 decoy represents a very promising immunotherapeutic drug for both SARS-CoV-2 variant neutralization and infected cell killing via the UniMAB and UniCAR system and might, therefore, clearly improve the treatment of COVID-19 patients.