NEW YORK – Oxford Immunotec said on Wednesday it has begun a collaboration with specialty vaccine firm Valneva to perform T-cell testing on participants receiving Valneva's COVID-19 vaccine candidate in a study.
Oxford Immunotec, which is being acquired by PerkinElmer, will use its research-use-only T-Spot Discovery SARC-CoV-2 test to test participants using Saint-Herblain, France-based Valneva's inactivated whole-virus vaccine candidate VLA2001. The study is a randomized Phase I/II clinical study to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of VLA2001 in healthy subjects. Oxford, UK-based Oxford Immunotec's test will be used to determine whether the vaccine induces a T-cell response in the participants.
The test allows SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells to be detected and enumerated and is also being used in a study conducted by Public Health England to evaluate the potential for at-home coronavirus testing.
"Understanding the T-cell response as well as the antibody response will lead to a greater understanding of the breadth of the immune response to this candidate, and that could be vitally important, particularly as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 continue to appear," Oxford Immunotec CEO Peter Wrighton-Smith said in a statement.