Luke Miles

Background

About Luke Miles

Passive immune therapies, also known as monoclonal antibody therapies, are a potent yet careful approach to treating neurodegenerative diseases. The therapeutic strategy allows us to identify protective elements of immunity and develop singular antibodies to confer those protections. Monoclonal antibody therapies have recently proved helpful to slow the progression of dementia in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Immunoglobulin-G class antibodies constitute up to 20% of proteins in blood plasma, but they are generally excluded from the brain by the blood-brain-barrier. While frustrating to drug development, this exclusion of antibodies from the brain is an important protection from the environment and harmful drugs. Our goal is not to accumulate therapeutic antibody in the brain, but rather, to figure out how little of a well-designed drug we can get away with for therapeutic effect. To this end we use advanced computational biology and empirical data to examine clinically tested and novel therapeutic candidates and correlate antibody structure and function with clinical outcomes. By identifying unique mechanisms of action at the atomic scale, we are able to engineer and simulate enhanced antibody structures with exquisite specificity for their intended target and subtle immune functions for safe and effective immune therapies to treat AD. We then make these therapeutic candidates and test them for optimal performance for development.