NEW YORK – Transfusion and transplantation diagnostics company Immucor said Tuesday that it has invested an undisclosed amount in German molecular matching and predictive analytics firm Pirche as part of a new partnership to expand the capabilities of its own software.
As part of the partnership, Norcross, Georgia-based Immucor will receive exclusive access to Predicted Indirectly Recognizable HLA Epitopes (PIRCHE) scores and embedded visualizations for antibody analysis. This will give Immucor customers a direct interface to Berlin-based Pirche's artificial intelligence-driven epitope matching prediction pipeline.
"The establishment of our partnership with Pirche will allow transplant histocompatibility laboratories the option to integrate their data with PIRCHE [scores] easily," Immucor President and CEO Avi Pelossof said in a statement.
Immucor Chief Marketing Officer Christie Otis said that the partnership gives the firm the chance to "provide a unique offering" to laboratories of single-antigen results through the firm's Lifecodes LSA assays, HLA typing results from Immucor's Lifecodes HLA SSO typing kits, and Mia Fora NGS kits. The addition of PIRCHE-II and Pirche-Snowflake scores to Immucor's software also facilitates seamless calculation of T-cell and B-cell epitope matching.