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Description
The global market demand for biomarkers research has been increasing in the recent years due to the rapid world population growth. This has resulted in a larger number of organizations researching biomarkers. The advancements and innovations of biomarkers research have made it possible to utilize biomarkers use in detecting diseases and cures. Considering its immense potential, immunoprofiling is forecasted to become an essential tool in precision medicine, to help improve the efficiency of drugs by selecting patients exhibiting a good response and to assess the immune status of the patient.
The main objective of the development project is to develop automated data analysis platform to reduce time and costs needed for biomarker identification and validation. Automation of the antibody profile analysis would revolutionize immune screening like next generation sequencing revolutionized DNA analysis. The platform would substitute current data analysis processes which is very time-consuming and inefficient. Currently collecting, cleaning and analysing the data requires a lot of manual operations and could only be carried out by specialists with very specific knowledge.
The automated data analysis platform would enable to predict early stage type 2 diabetes by utilizing immunoprofiling based disease and health risk diagnostics solution developed by IPDx. The platform would substitute current data analysis processes which is very time-consuming and inefficient. It could take as long as up to a month, for a researching company to detect the biomarkers. IPDx is in the development process of an MVA automation system, that would reduce the biomarkers detection time 10x.
The Norwegian partner engaged in this development project is Oslo University Hospital whose primary role is to collect blood samples from type 2 diabetic patients and to provide expert scientific input into the analysis of the results.
Summary of project results
Project activities were implemented according to the time and action plan. Short overview of the achievements are as follows:
- Developed, optimized and tested new protocol resulting in significant quality controls and time efficiency of our technology to analyze antibody profiles. This includes both lab protocols and software analysis work packages.
- Validated type 2 diabetes and Sjögrens syndrome biomarkers with our new enhanced technology platform. This will enable us to further develop these biomarkers for T2D diabetes early detection and Sjögren syndrome differential diagnosis clinical test.
- Next steps for IPDx include further development of our diabetes diagnostic test and to apply our technology on other disease groups. We have already begun working in the autoimmune disease field as we see this is an area where methods to develop precision medicine drugs is highly needed. Our first target is Sjogren’s syndrome.
Although the product was developed as planned, the costs of the partner (University of Oslo) remained significantly lower than planned. The costs of the managing partner were also lower (lower than planned salary costs, interim financial difficulties and the situation resulting from the corona pandemic, which prevented travel).
Project resulted with 6 new jobs. The estimated growth in net operational profit was 27%.
Summary of bilateral results
The partnership worked smoothly, although the role of the Norwegian partner turned out to be slightly smaller than originally planned. The partner was mainly involved in the analysis of samples. At the same time, the partner was very helpful in organizing brainstorming sessions, which, unfortunately, is not directly reflected in the project costs.