ThymoFox Inc.
Organization Description
Thymofox is developing targeted, orally available therapies that induce thymic regeneration and rejuvenation to restore immune function in aging people and immunocompromised patients. The age-related involution and degeneration of the thymus impair its ability to produce new T-cells, which is thought to contribute to older people’s weakened resistance to new immune threats. Therefore, thymic regeneration could protect aging people against infectious disease and cancer.
Thymofox is a Venture Creation company of Apollo Health Ventures. Its CEO is Chris Shepard, Venture Partner at Apollo Health Ventures and cofounder; the scientific cofounders are Jarrod Dudakov and Marcel van den Brink.
In a study of individual thymic cells from mice from weanling to late middle age, Dudakov found that as mice age, more and more of their critical thymic epithelial cells (TEC) exhibit low expression of hallmark TEC genes and fail to help educate T-cells or repair damage. These “age-associated TECs” (aaTECs) are located in thymic “dead zones,” where TECs are still present but no new T-cells are generated. Similar “dead zones” appear to exist in humans. They are now working to see if the drivers of aaTEC conversion or aaTEC themselves could be targets for thymic regeneration. It is not clear if this science is incorporated into Thymofox’s pipeline.
Thymofox states that it has developed “a pipeline of compounds with diverse pharmacology targeting thymus regeneration” using “sophisticated tools, engineered in human thymus cells” and “sophisticated fingerprinting techniques to determine how our drug candidates modulate regenerative pathways … understand the targeted mechanism of action, and select biomarkers to identify the most responsive patients.” They do not seem to have clarified what these tools are.
The company “pledges to partner with patients as we work to discover and develop new, effective therapies for immune reconstitution by thymus regeneration, including treatments in oncology, vaccines, and age-related decline in immune function.”