Developing Gut-stable Antibody Mimetics to Enhance Chicken Health

Antibodies are an immensely powerful therapeutic class thanks to their high-specificity for target molecules. However, antibodies are proteins and are not widely used in agriculture because they are rapidly digested in the gastrointestinal tract. This means that they have to be injected which is usually prohibitively expensive for agricultural applications. The Howarth group, at the University of Oxford, have developed a new antibody mimic, based on the trypsin inhibitor protein, SBTI, from soybeans. Engineering this protein has allowed the creation of antibody-like molecules, termed gastrobodies, which are highly stable in the acidic and digestive conditions of the gut. The livestock industry is coming under increasing pressure to reduce its reliance on antibiotics but there remain many infectious bacterial and parasitic diseases that cause billions of pounds worth of economic damage every year. This project will use the gastrobody technology to target signalling molecules involved in bacterial and parasitic infection of the chicken gut. This will provide novel prophylactic and curative treatments for the poultry industry as well as developing a technology which has wider applications across animal and human gut health.