Benzinga | Jan 13, 2021 09:19AM EST

Oxford Immunotec Reports Its T-SPOT Discovery SARS-CoV-2 Test Is Used To Measure Efficacy Of Valneva's VLA2001 COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate In Phase 1/2 Study

Oxford Immunotec Global PLC (NASDAQ:OXFD) (the "Company"), a global, high-growth diagnostics company, announce the start of a collaboration with Valneva. The Company will perform T cell testing on participants receiving Valneva's inactivated whole-virus COVID-19 vaccine candidate (VLA2001) with the research use only T-SPOT Discovery SARS-CoV-2 test. The VLA2001-201 study is a randomized Phase I/II clinical study designed to evaluate the safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus vaccine candidate in healthy subjects, the first study of its kind performed in Europe.

The Company's T-SPOT Discovery SARS-CoV-2 test will assess if the vaccination induces a T cell response in study subjects.

T-SPOT Discovery SARS-CoV-2 builds on the Company's experience with their T-SPOT technology platform, used clinically for diagnosis of TB (the T-SPOT.TB test) and the assessment of the immune response to CMV in transplant patients (the T-SPOT.CMV test). The T-SPOT technology platform is a commercialized and regulated ELISPOT platform, which allows for the standardized and reproducible measurement of T cells reactive to SARS-CoV-2. It also allows centralization of sample processing when used with the Company's T-Cell Xtend(r) reagent, which extends the time from sample collection to the start of sample processing to up to 32 hours.

The T-SPOT Discovery SARS-CoV-2 test has demonstrated in previous studies that SARS-CoV-2 responsive T cell numbers were associated with protection from COVID-191. Collecting T cell data in the VLA2001-201 study may add valuable additional information for assessing the efficacy of Valneva's inactivated whole-virus vaccine candidate.

Dr. Peter Wrighton-Smith, CEO of Oxford Immunotec, said, "I am proud of all the hard work being done by our teams to enable our T cell test to be used to better understand the efficacy of this vaccine candidate. 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."

For additional information, please visit: https://tspotdiscovery.com and https://valneva.com/press-release/valneva-initiates-phase-1-2-clinical-study-of-inactivated-adjuvanted-covid-19-vaccine-candidate/

1 Wyllie D, Mulchandani R, Jones H et al. "SARS-CoV-2 responsive T cell numbers are associated with protection from COVID-19: A prospective cohort study in keyworkers". MedRxIV Nov 4 2020. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.02.20222778v1 (Preprint)