WESTBURY, NY — July 28, 2020 — BioIVT, a leading provider of research models and services for drug and diagnostic development, today announced that it can now provide broader access to its growing inventory of plasma, serum, and saliva specimens from active and recovered COVID-19 patients for use in drug, diagnostic, and vaccine research.
“COVID-19 has already afflicted more than 16 million people and claimed more than 650,000 lives worldwide. It is a complex disease that demands the attention of the world’s best medical researchers. We are already working with more than 500 clients, including pharmaceutical, biotechnology and in vitro diagnostic companies, and academic and government research groups in the US, EU, Asia, and Australia, endeavoring to accelerate their critical research by providing high quality, well annotated COVID-19 specimens and related services,” said Jeff Widdoss, vice president of donor center operations at BioIVT.
BioIVT currently has more than 5,000 COVID-19 specimens available and ready to ship. They include plasma, serum, and saliva collected from donors with active COVID-19 symptoms; small volume and bulk units of plasma and serum from COVID-19 recovered donors; and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) isolated from currently symptomatic and recovered COVID-19 donors.
BioIVT is adding new COVID-19 specimens to its inventory every week. They include nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs, saliva, and blood-derived and immune cells from acute, antibody positive, and recovered COVID-19 donors. Specimens are collected from fully consented donors in hospitals, clinics, and blood donation centers in the US, EU, and UK. BioIVT also has a mobile phlebotomy service in the US, which allows COVID-19 patients who are quarantined at home to participate. In addition, it collects remnant samples from testing centers, ensuring that no valuable research samples are wasted.
BioIVT also provides specialized services at its US blood donor centers for manufacturers who want to test their point-of-care diagnostic devices. For example, it can collect matched sets of blood samples in different anticoagulants so that manufacturers can check that their assay gives the same result for each one or it will develop blood panels with specimens that are hemolyzed or lipemic to see how that interferes with the test device’s results. It also conducts specificity studies, checking for false positives by making sure that the test device gives a negative result for a viral marker in a population that should not have any positive viral markers.
Research Activities Supported
BioIVT is partnering with COVID-19 researchers on three major applications: validating in vitro diagnostics; supporting vaccine and immune response development; and studying the effects of co-morbidities, such as diabetes, and social habits, such as smoking or diet, on disease pathogenesis.
Validating in vitro diagnostics — BioIVT provides NP swabs, saliva, serum, and plasma from remnant and clinical collections for acute nucleic acid tests (NATs) and antigen assays. Serum, plasma, whole blood, and dried blood spot cards are offered from symptomatic and recovered donors for serology assays. Serology cross-reactive controls are also available for endemic coronaviruses and other respiratory pathogens.
Developing vaccines — BioIVT can supply serum, plasma, whole blood, PBMCs, and leukopaks from symptomatic and recovered COVID-19 patients to support research into humoral and cellular immune responses. The serology cross-reactive controls for endemic coronaviruses and other respiratory pathogens can also be used for this application.
Studying the impact of pre-existing conditions — BioIVT can supply serum from donors who smoke or suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and serum, plasma, or whole blood from donors with diabetes or who follow a specific diet.
BioIVT specimens are accompanied by a comprehensive dataset, which includes donor demographics, such as age, ethnicity, gender, body mass index, and smoking status, to maximize their research utility.
All BioIVT blood collections are conducted under institutional review board oversight and according to US Food and Drug Administration regulations and American Association of Blood Banks guidelines.
Additional information about BioIVT’s current inventory of COVID-19 specimens is available at https://hubs.ly/H0s-JDK0.
