Oral 9th Venoms to Drugs 2026

  Multi-Chemokine Targeting Strategies to Tackle Immune System Complexity (147697)

Levi J. Naunton 1 , Yasindhu Talagala 1 , Gimani Fernando 1 , Pramod Aryal 1 , Martin J. Stone 1 , Ram Prasad Bhusal 1
  1. Infection and Immunity Program, Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

Chemokines and their receptors are central regulators of immune cell trafficking during both immune surveillance and pathological inflammation. In autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, as well as in cancer, dysregulated chemokine networks drive persistent immune cell infiltration. Despite decades of research, therapeutic strategies targeting individual chemokines or their receptors have largely failed, reflecting the redundancy and complexity of the chemokine system, in which multiple chemokines act in concert. Our research addresses this challenge by developing agents that can simultaneously neutralize groups of functionally related chemokines. We exploit the unique properties of tick salivary proteins, known as “evasins,” which naturally bind multiple chemokines. Through structural and mutagenesis studies, we have gained detailed insights into how chemokines interact with evasins. Integrating these insights with an in vitro evolution system coupled with next-generation sequencing, we have engineered variants with tailored chemokine selectivity. Together, this work provides a framework for designing multi-chemokine inhibitors that selectively target subsets of chemokines implicated in disease and establishes a versatile discovery platform for next-generation biologics.