NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Beckman Coulter is collaborating with the Immune Tolerance Institute to establish a center that will study the roles that the human immune system plays in diseases, ITI said Monday.
The Institute, a non-profit corporation founded in part by the University of California, San Francisco, said the center initially will be sited at Beckman Coulter’s Cellular Analysis Business Group in Miami and it will integrate genomic, proteomic, bioinformatics, and cellular technologies to study immune functions in patients with immune-related and other diseases.
The center, called the Center for Critical Path Immunology, will work with academic and corporate partners to develop novel biomarkers that would be useful in developing new drugs and companion diagnostic tests, ITI said.
ITI is focused on developing cellular and molecular immunological assays to be used in immunotherapeutic development, and on analyzing the data from these assays in parallel with clinical safety and efficacy data using bioinformatics approaches.
The CCPI will be the “first step in bringing to fruition our mission to transform the drug discovery process to one that identifies promising therapies in their early phases of development, and that produces drug candidates that are safer, more highly targeted and effective in treating immune system-related diseases," ITI President and CEO Louis Matis said in a statement.