Avacta Group, the developer of Affimer biotherapeutics and reagents, has begun work with the UK government’s CONDOR programme to evaluate and validate the high-throughput COVID-19 bead-assisted mass spectrometry (BAMS) assay developed with Adeptrix.
The CONDOR programme, recently funded by the National Institute for Health Research, UK Research and Innovation, Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation, was created by the UK government to provide a route for evaluating new COVID-19 diagnostic tests in hospitals and in community healthcare settings.
Adeptrix’s novel BAMS platform uses Affimer reagents to capture the virus and viral proteins from patient samples, and combines this with the power of mass-spectrometry analysis to provide a highly sensitive and specific diagnostic test. Up to 1000 nasopharyngeal swab or saliva samples per day can be analysed by a single member of staff using the BAMS assay, making it a very attractive high-throughput technique for COVID-19 screening in the clinical setting.
Through the collaboration with the CONDOR scheme, Avacta will be provided access to patient samples and collaborators in UK hospitals to evaluate the performance of the prototype BAMS assay and to conduct the clinical validation study.
The work with the CONDOR programme will commence immediately to evaluate the test performance using real patient samples and will quickly progress to full clinical validation.
