Lyon, France – June 15, 2023 – ErVaccine Technologies, a French biotechnology company developing next-generation therapeutic vaccines and cellular immunotherapies in oncology, targeting new families of “unconventional” tumor antigens derived from human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), announced today the renewing of the Bioinformatics team by appointing talented people skilled in computational biology and machine learning.
Under the supervision of Professor Stéphane Depil, founder and Chairman of the Board, the bioinformatic team will be responsible for identifying tumor epitopes based on novel bioinformatics algorithms, implementing and integrating in areas of company’s development.
Commenting on the appointments, ErVaccine Founder and Chairman, Professor Stéphane Depil, said, “ErVaccine has selected its Bioinformatic team to provide the company with impeccable technical credentials and forward-thinking leaders to significantly support company growth to reach next milestones. The team will ensure that our platform optimizes best-in-class bioinformatics capabilities to generate meaningful and novel insights to impact further developments.”
Bioinformatics team members include:
Felix Raimundo – Senior computational biologist
Felix Raimundo, PhD, is a computational biologist specializing in leveraging machine learning for understanding the natural sciences. With an engineering degree from Telecom Paris and a Ph.D. from Google Brain and Institut Curie, he conducted pioneering research on single-cell data analysis, focusing on the reliability of unsupervised learning. At ErVaccine, he will use computational biology and machine learning advancements to contribute to cancer immunotherapy target discovery.
Adrian Valente – Senior computational biologist
Adrian Valente, PhD, studied Mathematics at École Polytechnique, obtained an MSc in Computer Science from EPFL and a PhD in Computational Neuroscience from École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Having worked as a software engineer at Microsoft, he gained experience in delivering production-ready code. During his doctoral research, Adrian developed new interpretable AI-driven methods to gain insights from high-dimensional datasets, working closely with both biologists and modellers. At ErVaccine, Adrian will apply his versatile skills to advance cancer immunotherapy target discovery.
Jeanne Bauduin – Junior computational biologist
Jeanne Bauduin, a recent graduate from AgroParisTech, an engineering school specializing in life sciences, is an aspiring professional in the field of bioinformatics. She built a strong background in statistical analysis by attending a Master of Mathematics applied to life sciences at École Polytechnique, and furthered her expertise by pursuing a specialized master’s degree in bioinformatics and modeling at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Jeanne honed her skills through hands-on experience in the analysis of NGS and OMICS data, notably during her internships at IBENS and metagenomics-oriented start-up GMT Science.
About ErVaccine Technologies
ErVaccine Technologies, a preclinical stage biotechnology company, founded in October 2019 by Professor Stéphane Depil, an onco-hematologist and researcher at Centre Léon Bérard, is paving the way on new therapeutic perspectives in the treatment of cancers that respond insufficiently to current immunotherapies. Thanks to the value of using antigens derived from human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs). ErVaccine is specialized in the development of next-generation therapeutic vaccines, and modified T-cell immunotherapies, targeting new families of so-called “unconventional” tumor antigens such as those derived from endogenous retroviruses. ErVaccine Technologies determines tumor epitopes commonly shared among patients based on novel bioinformatics algorithms to identify candidate epitopes that are then validated by proteomic approaches and immunological tests. The first targeted indication is triple-negative breast cancer, with results generated in ovarian cancer, sarcoma and acute myeloid leukemia. The company is integrated within a leading comprehensive cancer center @ (CRCL/CLB, with a team of high-level experts).
About HERVs
About 8% of the human genome consists of sequences of retroviral origin, namely HERVs. HERVs are relics of ancient retroviral infections that affected the germ line of primates and their ancestors along the last 100 million of years. HERVs are kept silent in normal cells but can be aberrantly expressed by tumor cells. Because of their similarity to viral protein fragments recognized as foreign by the immune system, HERV-derived antigens are prime targets, shared by different tumors, for the development of novel cancer vaccines or T-cell based therapies, especially in tumors that respond poorly to current checkpoint inhibitor (anti-PD1/-PD-L1) immunotherapy approaches.
Contacts
| Ms. Nathalie Donne, EMBA | Prof. Stéphane Depil |
| CEO | Founder & Chairman of the Board |
| Nathalie.donne@ervaccinetechnologies.fr | Stephane.depil@ervaccinetechnologies.fr |