VirAn – developing multiplex beads to better understand the immune status of Covid-19 patients

As part of the effort to combat Covid-19 a consortium comprised of the Helmholtz Centre for Infectious Diseases (HZI), the Charité, Attomol GmbH and PolyAn GmbH has initiated the development of an open source platform to facilitate the rapid development and optimization of high-throughput multiplex bead assays to determine virus antibody specifity and immune status. The VirAn project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The Helmholtz Centre for Infectious Diseases (HZI), the Charité, Attomol GmbH and PolyAn GmbH together with support of the Amsterdam UMC, Universida de Vigo, Bar-Ilan University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev will develop an open source platform to facilitate the rapid development and optimization of multiplex assays for:

  • Determination of the immune status in a population in combination with clinical and demographic data to facilitate stratification of patients and better be able to assess the progress of the pandemic in the population.
  • Epidemiological and clinical studies to determine antibody specificity and cytokine concentration in one multiplex assay.
  • Determination of the effectiveness of vaccines and therapeutics, e.g. in conjunction of clinical trials and concomitant to therapy
  • In-vitro diagnostic test

The platform shall be compatible with most conventional flow cytometers available on the market. The multiplex bead set for research purposes is explicitly designed as an open source platform in which the reagents and methods as well as the results of validation tests shall be published. This will enable research groups to extend the set of parameters if necessary and thus adapt the multiplex bead assays to their specific research goal.

Within the project it is planned that both HZI and Charité will test patient samples as well as samples from animal models using selected antibodies, cytokines and other, to be defined biomarkers. In parallel in-vitro diagnostic tests will be developed at Attomol.

Contact

Dr. Uwe Schedler, Geschäftsführer PolyAn GmbH
Email: mail@poly-an.de

About PolyAn

PolyAn is a nanotechnology company specialized in the modification of surfaces using Molecular Surface Engineering (MSE). Since 1996 PolyAn develops and manufactures consumables for applications that require high signal-to-noise ratios. Our products include supports for microarrays, fluorescence encoded microparticles and calibration tools for fluorescence imaging systems.