Blood analysis services

Tender description

This Voluntary ex ante transparency (VEAT) notice acknowledges that Trinity College Dublin proposes to issue a contract to CDI Laboratories. This will activate laboratory based analysis services using the proprietary VirScan™ technology. The VirScan™ technology offers unique sample throughput capability and is critical to the objectives of the research programme funded by SFI at Trinity College Dublin. Researchers at the Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI) are assessing risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 in older adults using samples from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). The VirScan™ assay will allow us to determine levels of antibodies against all known human viruses in a subset of TILDA participants. This viral history data will be used to assess risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. The Antygen VirScan service provides a unique way to assay a patient’s viral history by analyzing antiviral antibodies to a phage library displaying peptides from 206 species and over 1000 strains of viruses. Typically, such tests measure only one virus at a time. Using a synthetic representation of all human viral peptides, this blood test identifies antibodies against all known human viruses. No other known product can achieve this level of detection in a single blood sample. To achieve the same amount of data, more patient sample would be required in order to run multiple single-assay tests, which would likely exceed the amount of participant plasma that we have available. Additional cost, time, and staff workload would be required if results were collected by those other ‘traditional’ methods. In reagents alone, a PCR test can cost thousands of dollars per molecule of study, which would limit our choice of targets compared to the VirScan™ comprehensive assay. The VirScan™ technique was developed by Prof. Steve Elledge’s Harvard laboratory and they licensed CDI to market the commercial application of his research. Only CDI Laboratories can provide this service. Prof. H Benjamin Larman is a co-inventor and is on CDI Laboratories scientific advisory panel. CDI Laboratories will accept human patient plasma samples from the TILDA study. CDI labs will process Trinity samples using their proprietary VirScan™ procedure which identifies every virus annotated to have human tropism in the UniProt database. [https://cdi.bio/antygen-virscanphip-seq-service/] This service includes: VirScan Analysis (>1000 individual strains across 206 unique viral species with known human tropism) of 700 serum samples.