Ichor Biologics, a developer of human monoclonal antibodies to treat infectious diseases, announced on Monday that it has received a USD300,000 grant from the US National Institutes of Health to utilise its platform technology for the development of broadly neutralizing antibodies to treat deadly hantavirus infections, which cause a severe febrile disease termed hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS).

According to the company, HCPS leads to death in up to 40% of otherwise healthy individuals. It added that hantaviruses are typically transmitted from rodent-to-person, however there is evidence that at least one strain, Andes hantavirus, is able to spread person-to-person.

Hantavirus infections are considered to be rare, but factors such as climate change and urbanisation are expected to increase the incidence of infections in the future. Due to the high mortality rate, potential for intentional dissemination and lack of any effective treatment, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Department of Defense (DoD) all consider hantavirus a potential bioterrorism threat.

Based in New York City, Ichor Biologics has developed a multifaceted platform that identifies the key immune responses that correlate with protection from infectious diseases and engineers its antibody therapeutics to induce these protective immune responses in patients suffering from acute disease. The company also utilises proprietary machine learning software to predict antibody-pathogen binding regions and make high affinity variants of its therapeutic antibody candidates. In addition. Ichor offers Ab discovery and development services to biotechnology companies interested in developing antibody-based therapeutics.