Immune monitoring COVID-19

Cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 are only visible to CD8+ T cell after virus proteins have been processed and presented by MHC class I molecules – and only then are the CD8+ T cell able to eradicate the infection.

While antibodies against virus are important to prevent or minimise infection, CD8+ T cells are responsible for clearing the virus from the body. Hence, the identification of peptides being presented by MHC class I is essential to  

immunAware can assist researchers in academia and industry who are pursuing novel COVID-19 vaccines with our custom MHC class I easYmers — allowing researcher to generate tetramers reagents from day-to-day and monitor immune responses. In the current pandemic scenario it is essential not only to focus on a few HLA allotypes, rather it is essential to be able to monitor as many allotypes as possible to ensure a novel vaccine targets a broad ranges of allotypes. Our portfolio of easYmers are covering 34 HLA allotypes (HLA-A,-B,-C) which is further supplemented by HLA molecules available for custom tetramer production, bringing the number of available allotypes up to 81. Thus, our range of allotypes ensures a coverage to a 2% frequency in the caucasian population. 

The easYmer reagents can also be used to validate the binding of predicted epitopes to further stratify the selection of potential vaccine targets. In addition, we are also able to assist in the epitope section process by analysing peptide candidates in our state-of-the-art peptide-MHC class I dissociation assay where we can monitor the stability of immune-complexes in real-time.