March 30, 2020 | March featured news, products, and partnerships from around the diagnostics community from numerous companies, universities, and organizations, including Sight Diagnostics, NuProbe, Duke-NUS, and more.
Sight Diagnostics and Sheba Tel Hashomer announced their new collaboration aimed at mitigating the risk of contamination by COVID-19. Sight’s OLO blood analyzer will provide rapid FBC (full blood count) results in a dedicated lab within Israel’s flagship government-run hospital, to process samples of infected patients who are being monitored and treated in a separate field hospital. Prior to deploying OLO for coronavirus patient testing, Sight ran a two-month evaluation at the central lab of Sheba Tel Hashomer. The successful results led to implementing OLO for FBC testing. OLO also received 510(k) clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) late 2019. Currently, OLO is being used for routine testing of Sheba’s positive coronavirus patients. “OLO’s compact design makes it easy to set up quickly in a setting reserved for testing only contagious blood samples. Eliminating the risks of processing these samples alongside regular lab samples is uniquely advantageous in managing outbreaks of highly infectious diseases,” said Ram Doolman, Director of Sheba’s Laboratories Division and Automated Mega-Laboratory, in a press release. “By setting up a quarantined lab that requires special protocols in handling samples from infected patients, we are taking the necessary steps to protect our staff who are on the frontlines, fighting the coronavirus epidemic.” OLO’s technology combines computer vision and AI to digitize each blood sample into more than 1,000 high resolution images. ”We are planning to further develop our technology to diagnose serious conditions, including complications that stem from a viral infection, that have a distinct visual signature in the blood sample,” said Yochay Eshel, VP of R&D at Sight, in an official statement. “We believe in the impact our technology could have on the management of infectious disease, and we are keen to do our part to help.” Press release
NuProbe has signed an agreement with Oxford Nanopore Technologies, where Oxford Nanopore has licensed NuProbe's Blocker Displacement Amplification technology globally for undisclosed consideration. The technology combination offers the potential to combine Oxford Nanopore sequencing, which offers real-time, rapid turnaround, scalable sequencing of any length DNA or RNA fragments, with the NuProbe technique to enable greater detection sensitivities and quantification of somatic mutations at less than 5% allele frequency. This collaboration will support the expanding use of Oxford Nanopore sequencing in applications such as cancer, where targeted sequencing for the characterization of SNVs and SVs can be achieved alongside methylation analysis using small, accessible devices such as MinION and Flongle. "NuProbe's Blocker Displacement Amplification (BDA) technology selectively suppresses PCR amplification of wildtype DNA sequences at hundreds of genomic loci," David Zhang, Head of Innovation at NuProbe, said in a press release. "Thus, BDA can enhance the analytical sensitivity of nanopore sequencing, and enables mutation profiling of low-abundance variants with accuracy comparable to or better than sequencing-by-synthesis platforms – supporting greater adoption of nanopore sequencing for oncology applications." The companies plan to collaborate on the development of software tools to enable researchers to design bespoke and highly sensitive panels based on the technology. The goal is to enable users to analyze somatic mutations and gene fusions from tumor tissue and blood, and to be able to scale up these workflows for rapid and high throughput use in any environment. Press release
A state-of-the-art facility to fast-track new medicines for patients was opened by the Australian Minister for Health the Hon. Greg Hunt and Victorian Minister for Health the Hon. Jenny Mikakos at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. The $75 million-dollar National Drug Discovery Center (NDDC) will advance Australia's drug discovery capabilities and reduce the time it takes to bring new medicines to market. The NDDC was generously supported by $25 million from the Australian Government and $18 million from the Victorian Government, with a $32 million investment from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, which includes income from the sale of venetoclax royalties and philanthropic gifts. The launch will include announcement of the first two successful recipients of a federal government subsidy to support drug discovery for cancer immunotherapy and type 2 diabetes. The subsidy will cover 90% of the cost of using the NDDC, reducing the cost of a traditional screening campaign - normally upwards of $300,000 - to around $30,000-$45,000. Press release
Arcturus Therapeutics and Duke-NUS Medical School announced their partnership to develop a Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine for Singapore. The development of a COVID-19 vaccine will be based on Arcturus's STARR technology and will take advantage of a unique platform developed at Duke-NUS allowing rapid screening of vaccines for effectiveness and safety. The STARR Technology platform combines self-replicating RNA with LUNAR, a leading nanoparticle non-viral delivery system, to produce proteins inside the human body. Due to superior immune response and sustained protein expression, Arcturus' STARR Technology is expected to produce a vaccine response at much lower doses compared to traditional mRNA vaccines. This could lead to the ability to treat many more people with a single GMP-manufactured production batch, thereby greatly increasing efficiency and reducing time required to produce sufficient quantities of vaccine for large populations. Press release