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Adaptive Biotechnologies Expands Partnership with Microsoft Focused on Decoding COVID-19 Immune Response
Seattle-based Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp. and Microsoft Corp. plan to leverage their existing partnership mapping population-wide adaptive immune responses to diseases at scale to study COVID-19. Finding the relevant immune response signature may advance solutions to diagnose, treat and prevent the disease, augmenting existing research efforts that primarily focus on the biology of the virus.
Adaptive Biotechnologies’ Chad Robins says, “We can improve our collective understanding of COVID-19 by decoding the immune system’s response to the virus and the disease patterns that can be inferred from studying these data at the population level. Immune response data may enable detection of the virus in infected people not showing symptoms and improve triaging of newly diagnosed patients, potentially solving two of the challenges we are facing in the current diagnostic paradigm.”
Adaptive will open enrollment in April to collect de-identified blood samples from individuals diagnosed with or recovered from COVID-19, in a virtual clinical trial. Immune cell receptors from these blood samples will be sequenced and mapped to SARS-CoV-2-specific antigens that will have been confirmed by Adaptive’s proprietary immune medicine platform to induce an immune response.
Leveraging Microsoft’s hyperscale machine learning capabilities and the Azure cloud platform, the accuracy of the immune response signature will be continuously improved and updated online in real time as more trial samples are sequenced from the study.
Microsoft’s Peter Lee says, “The solution to COVID-19 is not likely going to come from one person, one company or one country. This is a global issue, and it will be a global effort to solve it. Making critical information about the immune response accessible to the broader research community will help advance ongoing and new efforts to solve this global public health crisis, and we can accomplish this goal through our proven TCR-Antigen mapping partnership with Adaptive.”
For comments, questions or concerns, please contact Dennis Kaiser
