August 21, 2014

Seattle biotech startup Immusoft Corp. has raised $2.37 million from investors, including FF Science, a San Francisco venture fund that targets early stage technology and science companies. Founder and CEO Matthew Scholz, who launched Immusoft in 2009, said the funding will allow his company to scale up research, including approaching the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about doing human clinical trials...

August 21, 2014

Immunological memory, as provided by antibodies, depends on the continued presence of antibody-secreting cells, such as long-lived plasma cells of the bone marrow. Survival niches for these memory plasma cells are limited in number. In an established immune system, acquisition of new plasma cells, generated in response to recent pathogenic challenges, requires elimination of old memory plasma cells. Here, we review the adaptation of plasma cell memory to new pathogens...

January 21, 2014

Broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies are rare and have proved hard to elicit with any immunogen. We have tested in vitro the notion that such antibodies or other antiviral proteins could be made by lentivirus-mediated gene transfer into human hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs), followed by differentiation of the transduced cells into B cells, the most potent antibody-producing cells...

September 20, 2013

IMAGINE never having to take a pill again. Instead, mini drug factories hidden inside your bones, and made from your own immune cells, would churn out personalised drugs and other molecules designed to keep you fit and healthy. Such a factory has been created in mice, and could soon be tested in humans to treat HIV. "We want to turn people's cells into drug factories, giving them the genetic information they need to produce their own treatment," says Matthew Scholz of Immusoft in Seattle, which is developing the technique...

July 5, 2012

Matthew Scholz has been told many times that his idea for reprogramming the body’s immune cells to create drugs was impossible. Maybe dangerous. Maybe just dumb. Scholz, a computer scientist with no formal biology training, could easily have been written off as a quixotic dreamer until this spring, when he got his breakout moment. The foundation started by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, decided that Scholz’s startup,Immusoft, just might be onto something, granting it close to $400,000...

April 17, 2012

Peter Thiel, an early venture investor in Facebook and FierceMarkets, has handed out a round of grants of up to $350,000 to a slate of 6 startup biotech companies, each of which promises a game-changing approach to medicine. And he's hoping that handing out checks to these startup dreamers will help ignite some radical thinking on the possibilities of our collective "amazing future."...

April 17, 2012

While most of us are still reeling in shock after last week’s one billion Instagram buy, Peter Thiel — through both Founders Fund and the Thiel Foundation — is leading the charge into a future where humans don’t age or suffer from cancer, among other things. Call it crazy or whatever you’d like, but there’s no doubt that people who are trying to drastically change the world for the better often do...

Marie Powers

Although the concept of cell programming isn't new, Immusoft Corp.'s approach represents a new spin on the science. For a biotech company, Seattle-based Immusoft started with a decidedly different pedigree. With a background in computer sciences rather than chemistry or biology, Matthew Scholz, the company's founder and CEO, conceived an idea to fight disease by modifying information in human immune cells...

Donald B Kohn

Gene therapy is an emerging medical modality in which genetic diseases will be corrected by transfer of a normal version of the relevant gene into a patient's somatic cells. Gene transfer into the hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) of patients with hemoglobinopathies, congenital immune deficiencies and lysosomal storage diseases followed by their autologous transplantation could provide the same benefits as allogeneic transplantation, without the immunologic complications of graft rejection, graft versus host disease, and post-transplantation immunosuppressive therapy...