Interreg France-Switzerland Feder CELESTE program
CELESTE: when UGA and the University of Geneva work together to develop drugs to combat chronic inflammatory diseases and the rare innate immunodeficiency disease such as Chronic Graniulomatous Disease
To develop biological drugs to combat chronic inflammatory diseases such as Crohn’s disease or rheumatoid arthritis, and diseases of the blood or immune system, and to help develop new treatments, in particular to treat Chronic Graniulomatous Disease (CGD-X), are the objectives of the project supported by the Interreg France-Switzerland Feder CELESTE program (CEllules souches pLuripotentes Induites pour la modElisation de maladies du Sang et le développement de Thérapies innovantEs).
The skills of the French and Swiss partners at Grenoble Alpes University and the University of Geneva complement each other perfectly. As these skills are highly specific and not widely available, cross-border collaboration was an obvious choice right from the consortium’s inception. The project, which ran from December 1, 2017 to May 31, 2021, proved the relevance of the collaboration and its scientific and commercial benefits on both sides of the border.
Healthy and pathological macrophage models (CGD-X) derived from human induced pluripotent cells (iPSCs) have been developed by UGA in collaboration with Neurix SA and the University of Geneva to test biomedicines (Brault J, et al. Int J Nanomedicine. 2017 Mar 20;12:2161-2177. doi: 10.2147/IJN.S128611. Brault J, et al. Methods Mol Biol. 2019;1982:587-622. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-9424-3_35; Brault et al. Free Radic Biol Med. 2020 Jan;146:107-118. doi: 10.1016/j.freeradbiomed.2019.10.005). In addition, Nanolive SA in Lausanne was able to promote its innovative microscopes using a new technology - holotomography - to establish quality control of the cell models developed. Macrophage models derived from healthy human iPSCs were used to establish proof of concept of the efficacy of a SuperMApo® biomedicine developed by MED’INN’ Pharma SAS and the Université de Franche-Comté in preparation for future clinical trials in chronic inflammatory diseases (Bonnefoy et al. P, Front Immunol. 2018 Nov 13;9:2586. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2018.02586). The development by UGA in collaboration with the University of Geneva and Neurix SA of the “humanized mouse” model using pathological human iPSCs to test the biomedicines developed, was unsuccessful despite several transplant attempts.
Partnership:
Fr : Lead partner: Université Grenoble Alpes, Dr Marie José Stasia
Partners FR: MED’INN’PHARMA
University of Franche-Comté
Ch : Lead partner: University of Geneva, Pr Karl-Heinz Krause
Partners CH: NEURIX SA, Geneva
NANOLIVE SA, Lausanne
Funding:
Total project amount: 674 310.58€
of which FEDER funding: 260 964.40€.