Born from a decade of an industrial collaboration with an expert society in the field of therapeutics antibodies, NabGen Technology is a technological platform of the Laboratoire d’Ingénierie des Systèmes Macromoléculaires (LISM) located in Marseille, France.
Created in 2011 by Christian Cambillau (RD-CNRS emeritus) and Alain Roussel (RD-CNRS), its primary purpose was to provide innovating tools to aid crystallization: nanobodies.
Robust and stable, those biomolecules represent a versatile tool for the development of diagnostic programs, therapeutics treatments or even functional and structural characterization.
NabGen Technology offers today an extended range of services, in particular for the study of membranes proteins thanks to an innovating technology based on the use of extracellular vesicles. With more than a hundred collaborative projects treated since its launch, the platform knows a major boom those last few years.
Ebola virus is one of the most virulent pathogen agents. It induces a generalized hemorrhagic fever and a 25-90% mortality rate.
Its glycoprotein (GP), only surface protein and essential to the infection, allows its attachment to the target cell and the release of the viral DNA in the cytoplasm. Our main goal is to obtain neutralizing antibodies targeting the entry step of the virus.
We are developing our researches on obtaining neutralizing antibodies (nanobodies or vHHs) coming from immunized camelids with extracellular vesicles carrying the glycoprotein of the virus.
Bacterial secretion system type IX (SST9) has mostly been studied in Flavobacterium johnsoniae and Porphyromonas gingivalis. In P. gingivalis, a human pathogen, SST9 is used to secrete proteases, which participate in periodontitis. It has been previously shown that a group of 4 essentials genes, named porK-N (P. gingivalis) or gldK-N (F. johnsoniae), expresses the membrane core of T9SS. PorM protein (or GldM), which is anchored in the internal membrane, plays a central role in that complex by interacting with the external membrane complex PorK/PorN. Thanks to the use of nanobodies as aid for crystallization, we have solved atomic structures of periplasmic domains of PorM and we can propose a first model of functioning for secretion systems of type IX.
