BioLineRx, a biopharmaceutical development company based in Israel, announced that research underlying its EDP 10 project for the treatment of type 1 diabetes won the Hebrew University’s prestigious Kaye Innovation Award for a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The research was performed by Dr. Chamutal Gur MD, currently a physician at the Hadassah Medical Institute.Dr. Gur, under the supervision of Professor Ofer Mandelboim of the Hebrew University, Institute for Medical Research Israel Canada, Hadassah Medical School, studied the role of Natural Killer cells in autoimmune diseases. Her main project focused on the function of the NKp46 killer receptor in the development of type 1 diabetes. Dr. Gur and her colleagues have shown that a protein receptor called NKp46 present on Natural Killer cells has a critical role in the development of the disease in mice, and that inhibition of the receptor almost entirely prevented the development of diabetes.
This groundbreaking research is the basis for BioLineRx’s EDP-10 project, which is aimed at characterizing and developing efficient inhibitors of NKp46 for the prevention and possible treatment of type 1 diabetes. EDP-10 is being developed by BioLineRx in collaboration with Professor Mandelboim, Professor Yaacov Naparstek, Chairman of Medicine at Hadassah University Hospital and Professor of Medicine at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Medicine and Professor Angel Porgador, the Department of Microbiology and Immunology Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, who recently published the findings of the collaborative research on the mode of action of NKp46 in the Journal of Immunology, a leading scientific journal.
