RE: Zeus research note6 Oct 2020 21:19
Part 1
UK Government COVID-19 alliance
The award of funding to Oncimmune by the ‘UK Research and Innovation Ideas to Address COVID-19’ project, leverages its proprietary ImmunoINSIGHTS technology to help in predicting disease severity and treatment response, in collaboration with the Government’s research hub, Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC). This is a strong signal of recognition, enables Oncimmune to participate in critical efforts to mitigate the pandemic, and further showcase its technology on a broad stage. The collaboration paves the way for deeper understanding of the role of immunity in COVID-19, and successful outcomes can result in Oncimmune’s ownership of differentiated proprietary assets with enormous medical value, and with broad commercial applications in COVID-19 drug and vaccine development.
The initial deliverable by Oncimmune, as part of its funded collaboration in the ‘Immunity Profiling of Patients with COVID-19 for Therapy and Triage’ (IMPACTT) programme with MDC, is a validated infectious disease (COVID-19) NavigAIDTM biomarker panel; a prognostic tool, based on profiling the immune characteristics of 3,000 patient samples and clinical data, utilising its SeroTagTM platform. The resulting panel targets classification of symptoms as mild, moderate or severe, not only to help predict disease severity, but the likely responses to vaccines or therapies. In parallel, Oncimmune is building a specialised UK biorepository and data registry of COVID-19 samples, to deepen understanding of the disease and to support ongoing commercialisation of the ImmunoINSIGHTS platforms to the many biopharma companies seeking to tailor and optimise vaccines and therapies against the virus.