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(Sharecast News) - Immunodiagnostics company Oncimmune Holdings announced the signing of a new commercial contract with Verily Life Sciences on Monday, a member of Google owner Alphabet's stable, focusing on the autoantibody profiling of patients who had Covid-19 and gone on to develop long lasting symptoms for more than four weeks, or 'long Covid'.
The AIM-traded firm said under the terms of the new contract, Oncimmune would use its recently-validated infectious disease panel of biomarkers, developed under the 'IMmunity Profiling of pAtients with Covid-19 for Therapy and Triage', or 'IMPACTT' programme, to evaluate whether autoantibodies - which are present early in the Covid-19 infection - were associated with the development of long Covid.
Additionally, the company's infectious disease panel would also be used to assess whether the autoantibodies remained elevated in long Covid patients during their period of recovery.
Should the initial discovery phase prove successful, both Oncimmune and Verily had retained the rights to commercialise the resultant intellectual property, including the filing of patent applications for the development of a companion diagnostic.
"The real impact on society of long Covid is only beginning to be understood," said chief executive officer Dr Adam Hill.
"Oncimmune is a leader in infectious disease serological antibody profiling, and therefore this partnership with Verily, utilising Oncimmune's validated infectious disease panel, will seek to identify autoantibodies which are indicators for long Covid."
Dr Hill described it as "yet another exemplar" of Oncimmune's position in autoimmune profiling.
"As is typical with Oncimmune's contracts, there is potential for the initial discovery work in autoantibodies to progress onto the identification of intellectual property rights, and to the development of viable commercial companion diagnostic devices."
At 1417 GMT, shares in Oncimmune Holdings were down 8.2% at 112p.
