Immune cleverness startup Serimmune hopes to safer understand the relationship between antibody epitopes (the parts of antigen molecules that bind which will antibodies) and the SARS-CoV-2 graine.
The company’s proprietary technology, originally crafted at UC Santa Barbara, provides a new and given way of mapping the entire choice of an individual’s antibodies through a small blood sample. They do this using a bacterial peptide monitor — a sort of screening instrument that can isolate plasmid GENETIC MATERIAL from antibody-bound bacteria in a sample. This DNA then can be sequenced to identify epitopes, which often provide information about which antigens someone may have been exposed to, in addition to being how their immune system reacted to them.
“It’s a very highly multiplexed associated with exquisitely specific way of watching the epitopes found by just antibodies in a specimen, ” said Serimmune CEO Noah Nasser, who has a degree about molecular biology from UC San Diego and has previously been successful for several diagnostics companies.
Right away, Serimmune announced the launch of a new application of their core technology to help understand the disease states of and immune responses to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
“So what we do is we take these antibody profiles we build, and we’re able to then map those back with about a 12 amino acid specificity to the SARS-CoV-2 proteome,” said Nasser. “And what we find is that antibody expression is highly correlated to disease state, so we can distinguish mild, moderate, severe and asymptomatic disease on the basis of antibodies that are present in the specimen.”
The more patient data Serimmune can collect, the better its core technology becomes at finding patterns across different antigen exposure and disease severity. Noticing those patterns sooner won’t only help physicians and researchers to better understand how the SARS-CoV-2 virus operates, but can also inform new approaches to diagnostics, treatments and vaccines for any antigen.
Serimmune’s launch of its new COVID antibody epitope mapping service is a way of making this data more accessible to customers like vaccine companies, government agencies and academic labs that have shown interest in better understanding the immune response to SARS-CoV-2.
“The key was to zero in on the information that researchers wanted to know and standardize that,” said Nasser. “We can actually now provide these results back in as few as two days from sample receipt.”
Beyond this new service, Serimmune also has plans to launch a < hacia href="https://serimmune.com/covid19study/"> longitudinal clinical exploration on immunity to SARS-CoV-2 . Using a painless at-home collection kit, study people send in small blood samples into Serimmune, which then uses for core technology to explain an individual immunity map.
“We provide their whole results back to them as a a personal immune landscape within order to COVID, ” said Nasser. “And what we’re definitely not do is to understand as time passes how that immune frequency response changes, and what happens to which unfortunately immune response on replicated exposure to COVID. ”
The mapping system is now so specific not wearing running shoes can tell whether a patient offers you antibodies from natural claims the SARS-CoV-2 virus as well from a vaccine, he extra.
While the initially focus for Serimmune may be these applications to the COVID-19 pandemic for now, Nasser will mentioned that the company gets plans to move into personalized health-related, potentially offering their mapping service directly to interested person.
“We reckon that this has value to particular person patients in understanding their body’s immune system status and what antigens they’ve been exposed to, ” he identified. Until then, Serimmune methods to continue growing its helpful with more patient samples.
