Helyx Industries S.p.A. announces that its subsidiary Hyris has been awarded Lot 2 of a public tender issued by the Fundación para la Investigación Biomédica del Hospital Universitario La Paz (Madrid) for the supply of kits to determine cellular (T-cell) immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
Helyx Industries S.p.A. announces that its subsidiary Hyris has been awarded Lot 2 of a public tender issued by the Fundación para la Investigación Biomédica del Hospital Universitario La Paz (Madrid) for the supply of kits to determine cellular (T-cell) immunity to SARS-CoV-2. The supply is part of the ENE COVID SENIOR II research project, a sub-study of project ICI21/00065, funded by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII) with European Union – Next Generation EU resources under the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism. The lot award value is €94,000 (excl. VAT).
The kits supplied under the tender are based on a qPCR T-cell activation assay that leverages the proprietary Hyris System™ (the bCUBE™ instrument and the bAPP™ cloud platform): the method quantifies the messenger RNA of the chemokine CXCL10 as a marker of the antigen-specific T-cell response, enabling cellular immunity to be measured directly from whole blood. The technology is available in configurations suited both to research use and to diagnostic use — the latter with a CE-IVD–marked version — and has been used since the pandemic.
The technology has a strong scientific track record. The method was developed at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York) and is exploited by Hyris under an exclusive license; the results of the international study that demonstrated the approach — conducted with Duke-NUS Medical School (Singapore) and the diagnostics network SYNLAB — were published in 2022 in Nature Biotechnology. The same technology was also used within the European VACCELERATE programme to assess cellular immune response in vaccine trials.
Beyond its use against SARS-CoV-2, the same qPCR-based approach is potentially extendable to measuring the T-cell response to other pathogens — a prospect indicated by the published research — which Hyris will assess in light of research and market opportunities.
"The T-cell response is an essential part of immunity and, historically, one of the hardest to measure at scale. Having built on this technology — from international research through to field deployment — allows us today to support studies like this one and, looking ahead, to extend the same approach to other areas. It is a recognition of the work of our R&D team and of our scientific partners," said Lorenzo Colombo, CTO of Helyx Industries.
