Oncimmune Holdings plc (LON:ONC), the leading global immunodiagnostics group, has announced that it has signed two separate agreements with Roche Pharmaceuticals and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in each case to use the Company’s newly developed and proprietary Infectious Disease panel.
On 6 October 2020, Oncimmune announced the award of UK Government funding for the development and validation of an Infectious Disease NavigAID™ panel under the IMmunity Profiling of pAtients with COVID-19 for Therapy and Triage (“IMPACTT”) programme. Utilising the data from this and other work, the Company’s current SeroTag™ research panel has been tailored to predict COVID-19 disease severity and therapeutic response to the virus and the effectiveness of vaccines and other repurposed therapeutics as treatment against the disease. Both of these substantial new contracts will utilise this research tool to profile patient samples in search of immune related signatures in COVID-19 patients.
For Roche, Oncimmune will utilise its Infectious Disease panel to profile antibody and autoantibody responses in all patient samples from the Roche COVACTA trial, to look for immune signals of response, non-response and adverse events. The COVACTA trial was set up to evaluate the safety and efficacy of tocilizumab in patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia. The contract also includes an option to extend to IgA and IgM antibody profiling which will substantially increase the value of the contract.
In October 2020, Oncimmune also announced that it had entered into an agreement with Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, a world-leading medical research organisation, to provide antibody profiling in COVID-19 samples as biomarkers for this disease. Following on from this first project, Cedars-Sinai has agreed to expand its collaborative COVID-19 programme to study a unique cohort of patients.
Dr Adam M Hill, CEO of Oncimmune said: “We are delighted to be strengthening our partnership with Roche and Cedars-Sinai through these two very important projects. As the world shifts its focus to recovering from the pandemic, we are seeing continued interest in Oncimmune’s infectious disease offering. Today’s announcement is further validation of the importance of our Infectious Disease panel in supporting both clinical research and the development of vaccines and therapeutics. We are also experiencing substantial interest in our immuno-oncology and autoimmune activities, which together with our infectious disease offering, provides us with confidence in the continued growth of ImmunoINSIGHTS.”
