Bayhill Therapeutics Inc. Information

Bayhill Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company using its proprietary therapeutic BHT-DNA™ platform to develop a pipeline of novel products to treat autoimmune diseases in a fundamentally new manner. The Company's product candidates are designed to restore the immune system to its normal state known as "tolerance," by selectively eliminating specific, harmful immune responses while leaving the rest of the immune system intact. Through a targeted and selective approach, Bayhill's product candidates have the potential to improve efficacy, safety and tolerability relative to current therapies. The immune system is the major biological defense responsible for fighting pathogens and tumors by recognizing certain molecules, known as antigens. Antigens are defined as any substance that invokes the production of a specific immune response. These include proteins like MBP and proinsulin, and specific peptides that are fragments of those proteins. A properly functioning immune system attacks foreign antigens but is tolerant to self-antigens, which are antigens present in the body's own tissues. Autoimmune diseases occur when there is a breakdown of the mechanism responsible for tolerance that triggers the immune system to mediate an immune response against the body's own tissues. This inability to fend off this self directed autoimmune attack results in a chronic, debilitating disease characterized by tissue destruction. Major diseases for which there is a known autoimmune component include multiple sclerosis (MS), type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1D), myasthenia gravis (MG), and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Antigen-specific autoimmune responses to a self-antigen are considered the primary drivers of these diseases. Effective treatments that specifically disrupt this self-antigen response with minimal side effects could potentially address the fundamental cause of an autoimmune disease while leaving the broader immune system intact. The key components of immune response are lymphocytes, or specialized ...