The development of an effective vaccine against the latest coronavirus is an urgent need. Medical research communities in several countries around the world are developing and testing various drugs. To accelerate vaccine research, Microsoft and Adaptive Biotechnologies on expanding cooperation.
The companies will map population-wide adaptive immune responses to study the coronavirus. If a signature of the immune response is found, then it could help find solutions for diagnosing, treating and preventing the disease, complementing existing research. Microsoft and Adaptive will make the data available free of charge to any researcher, healthcare professional or organization around the world through an open data portal.
Microsoft and Adaptive are going to explore the immune response in the following way:
- Adaptive, with the help of Covance, will open registrations in April to collect anonymous blood samples using LabCorp's mobile phlebotomy service from individuals who are ill or have had Covid-19;
- immune cell receptors from these blood samples will be sequenced using Illumina platform technology and matched to SARS-CoV-2 specific antigens;
- the immune response signature found during the initial discovery work and the initial set of samples will be uploaded to the public data access portal;
- Using the power of Microsoft's super-scale machine learning and the Azure cloud platform, the accuracy of the immune response signature will be continuously improved and updated online in real time as samples are analyzed.
βThe solution against Covid-19 is unlikely to come from one person, one company or even one country. It is a global problem, and global efforts will be required for its solution β the vice president of division of researches and AI in Microsoft Peter Lee (Peter Lee) considers. "Sharing critical information about the immune response with a wider research community will help advance ongoing and emerging efforts to address this global public health crisis."
Source: 3dnews.ru