Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp. (Nasdaq: ADPT) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced they will leverage their existing partnership mapping population-wide adaptive immune responses to diseases at scale to study COVID-19.
Finding the relevant immune response signature may advance solutions to diagnose, treat and prevent the disease, augmenting existing research efforts that primarily focus on the biology of the virus. These data will be made freely available to any researcher, public health official or organization around the world via an open data access portal.
To generate immune response data, Adaptive will open enrollment in April to collect de-identified blood samples, using a LabCorp-enabled mobile phlebotomy service, from individuals diagnosed with or recovered from COVID-19 in a virtual clinical trial managed by Covance. Immune cell receptors from these blood samples will be sequenced using Illumina platform technology and mapped to SARS-CoV-2-specific antigens that will have been confirmed by Adaptive’s proprietary immune medicine platform to induce an immune response.
The immune response signature found from the initial discovery work and the initial set of samples will be uploaded to the open data access portal. Leveraging Microsoft’s hyperscale machine learning capabilities and the Azure cloud platform, the accuracy of the immune response signature will be continuously improved and updated online in real time as more trial samples are sequenced from the study.
To expedite the development and relevance of the immune response signature across the global population, the companies are seeking additional participation from institutions and research groups around the world to contribute blood samples to this open data initiative.
Providence, a large health system with 51 hospitals, including the one near Seattle that treated the first U.S. COVID-19 patient, is an initial clinical collaborator. Timing and enrollment details about the upcoming study and the open data access portal will be coming soon.
Institutions or collaborators interested in contributing blood samples can direct inquiries to [email protected]. For additional resources go to https://www.adaptivebiotech.com/about-us/media-resources/.
Led by Chad Robins, CEO and co-founder, Adaptive Biotechnologies is a commercial-stage biotechnology company focused on leveraging the inherent biology of the adaptive immune system to transform the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Its proprietary immune medicine platform reveals and translates the massive genetics of the adaptive immune system with scale, precision and speed to develop products in life sciences research, clinical diagnostics, and drug discovery. It has two commercial products, and a clinical pipeline to diagnose, monitor and enable the treatment of diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions and infectious diseases. Its goal is to develop and commercialize immune-driven clinical products tailored to each individual patient.
FinSMEs
21/03/2020