ProteinLogic And Stellenbosch University Receive $1.3 Million Grant From The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
ProteinLogic And Stellenbosch University Receive $1.3 Million Grant From The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. ProteinLogic, a biomarker discovery and commercialization company and Stellenbosch University, have announced that they have received a $1.35 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to accelerate the development of ImmiPrint® Technology to monitor treatment responses to TB antimicrobial chemotherapy. The collaborative project was conceived and developed with the assistance of PTNG Consulting, a specialised science consultancy. PTNG Consulting will oversee the project management of this undertaking.
ProteinLogic has forged a partnership with Stellenbosch University, South Africa, renowned for their significant contributions to global TB research. The non-dilutive funding from the Gates Foundation will allow ProteinLogic and Stellenbosch University to determine whether the use of ImmiPrint® technology can be extended to the monitoring of clinical responses to TB antimicrobial therapy.
Tuberculosis is one of the world’s deadliest diseases, killing about 3600 people per day in 2022. For people living with HIV, it is a major risk, accounting for one-third of deaths among this community. While global health efforts made steady progress against TB, the COVID-19 pandemic caused major disruptions to essential TB services, effectively reversing much of the progress made.
Additionally, the rise of drug-resistant strains of the bacterium causing TB has led to a sense of urgency to develop new treatments and prevention methods. Current treatments are lengthy (6 months treatment regimen) and diagnostic methods are complicated and costly. New treatments that are safer, shorter, simpler, and more affordable are urgently needed.
ProteinLogic’s ImmiPrint® Technology is a sensitive, specific, and minimally invasive precision medicine technology that uses high-throughput immunoassays to measure the levels of multiple immune system proteins in body fluids. They are comprised principally of soluble cluster of differentiation (CD) proteins as well as cytokines. These play a key role in immune responses and provide the basis for the identification of disease-specific patterns in blood and other body fluids. Patterns of these proteins can be used to define diagnostic proteomic fingerprints that are able to detect the presence of multiple different disease types sensitively and specifically.
The ability to monitor clinical responses to TB antimicrobial chemotherapy and the potential to predict TB antimicrobial chemotherapy responses at an early timepoint, will have a significant impact on the duration of clinical trials for new TB antimicrobial chemotherapies. Reducing the cost of research and development and enabling physicians to determine treatment outcomes in a timely manner will aid directly in the development of novel anti-TB chemotherapies.
Peter Klimt, Chairman of ProteinLogic, commented: “ProteinLogic’s ImmiPrint® technology provides the basis of a universal protein based search engine for the rapid, efficient, and cost-effective discovery of diagnostic biomarker signatures that address multiple disease categories. The non-dilutive funding received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will allow the Company to continue to explore the use of ImmiPrint® technology in the TB therapeutic area. We are immensely grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and our investors for supporting ProteinLogic’s vision for the future of disease diagnostics, which includes a focus on the development of high-impact and affordable diagnostics and disease monitoring systems accessible to both industrialised nations and developing economies.”
Professor Novel Chegou, Head of the Diagnostic Biomarker Research Laboratory, Stellenbosch University, South Africa stated: “Our colleagues and ourselves at Stellenbosch University have been fortunate to lead several clinical trials researching TB diagnostic biomarkers as part of the African-European Tuberculosis Consortium (AETBC), ScreenTB, TriageTB and other multicentred studies. Through this experience we have access to a large number of samples from a diverse range of clinical trials, collected in South Africa and other African sites. Tuberculosis to this day kills more people globally than HIV/AIDS and is the number one killer when it comes to deadly infectious diseases. Multidrug-resistant TB remains a public health crisis and we are in desperate need for new tools that may assist in the control of the disease. We are very grateful and excited to be using the funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to work together with ProteinLogic to determine the suitability of their biomarker signature and our own biomarkers for TB treatment monitoring. Our laboratory, as it is situated in a high burden African country and works closely with other laboratories across Africa is uniquely positioned to answer this question.”
