Proteona’s ESCAPE™ platform selected for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine characterization

Proteona has announced that it is beginning a partnership with Professor Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University 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 vaccine soon.

Proteona will use its ESCAPE™ technology to profile the immune response of patients receiving the vaccine. The ESCAPE™ platform provides a deep understanding of the immune cells through single cell proteogenomic profiling. It enables the researchers to identify key aspects of immune activation and then compare back to responses from other vaccination data using 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 noted that it is also in discussion with other vaccine developers to generate a common platform for data analysis across the different SARS-CoV-2 vaccination programs.

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