Announced on 12 May 2020, Proteona and Professor Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University will be partnering to to characterize the clinical response to a new SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
Professor Petrovsky, the director of endocrinology at Flinders Medical Centre, will be starting clinical trials of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine soon. Using Proteona’s ESCAPE™ technology they will be profiling the immune response of patients receiving the vaccine. This platform provides deep understanding of immune cells through single cell proteogenomic profiling. Thus, enabling researchers to identify key aspects of immune activation and in turn compare responses from other vaccination data while tapping on Proteona’s proprietary single cell database and AI tools.
Professor Petrovsky commented, “Years of work on vaccines have taught me that there are a lot of potential pitfalls in developing an effective vaccine. It is critical now as we speed through vaccine development for preventing COVID-19 that we gain a deep understanding of how each vaccine is working. We must measure the body’s response as deeply as possible to understand how the entire immune system is reacting and use those data to guide decision making about the vaccine’s efficacy. Our own vaccine will be starting human trials soon and we are happy to be working again with Proteona to deeply profile the vaccine response using their ESCAPE platform.”
The vaccine development is done in collaboration with Vaxine Pty Ltd, a company based in South Australia focusing on development of innovative vaccine technologies. The vaccine is currently undergoing animal testing in the US, before proceeding to human clinical trials.
“This type of work is where we excel and we are happy to play a role now in helping to bring forward vaccines for COVID-19,” said Andreas Schmidt, CEO of Proteona. “The data we collect as part of this study will benefit all vaccine development efforts around the world.”
Proteona is currently in discussion with other vaccine developer to generate a common platform for data analysis across the different SARS-CoV-2 vaccination programs. [APBN]