Oncimmune Holdings plc (LON:ONC), the leading global immunodiagnostics group, has announced that, following its announcement on 6 October that Oncimmune is being funded by the UK Government to develop a COVID-19 biomarker panel, the Company has signed a commercial agreement with Cedars-Sinai, California, USA, to provide antibody profiling in COVID-19 samples as biomarkers for this disease. Cedars-Sinai is a world-leading medical research organisation serving more than 1 million people each year in over 40 locations, with more than 4,500 physicians and nurses and 1,500 research projects in progress.
Under this agreement, Cedars-Sinai will provide Oncimmune with serum samples from staff exposed to or infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The project will identify biomarkers of the COVID-19 disease and compare these to a control set of healthy patient samples to be provided by Oncimmune. The project will seek to initially profile the antibodies of staff working at Cedars-Sinai hospitals to better understand the effects of the disease in healthcare workers.
On 6 October 2020, we announced Oncimmune’s participation in the IMmunity Profiling of pAtients with COVID-19 for Therapy and Triage programme to develop and validate an Infectious Disease NavigAID™ panel designed to predict COVID-19 disease severity and therapeutic response. This collaboration with Cedars-Sinai is the first commercial project to result from this IMPACTT programme.
Cedars-Sinai will also contribute novel antigens to the COVID-19 panel, and in return, will be the first academic partner to benefit from this IMPACTT programme. Oncimmune intends to continue to contract commercially with biopharmaceutical companies and academic organisations for the use of the COVID-19 panel to gain a deeper understanding of the immune response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Adam M Hill, CEO of Oncimmune said: “We are delighted to be partnering with such a prestigious organisation as Cedars-Sinai on this important programme. Oncimmune is responding to the global call for innovations to support the fight against COVID-19 by leveraging our capabilities in immune profiling. In so doing we will build on our knowledge of the disease and support the development of vaccines and therapeutics. We expect to announce further development collaborations and contracts over the coming months to be followed by contracts with biopharmaceutical companies once the COVID-19 panel is fully validated.”
