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Bio-Techne, Carterra Partner on COVID-19 Variant Analysis

NEW YORK ─ Bio-Techne and Carterra said Wednesday that they are collaborating to study more than 40 COVID-19 variants, including the Delta variant and other emerging variants as they are discovered.

Financial and other terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.

Minneapolis-based Bio-Techne has developed SARS-CoV-2 variants to fast-track the development of a scalable assay to measure the risk that new variants may evade the immune system, the firms said.

The collaborators are using a high-throughput analytical platform, LSA, developed by Salt Lake City-based Carterra, to characterize panels of SARS-CoV-2 spike and receptor-binding domain variants in an assay.

LSA combines flow printing microfluidics with high-throughput surface plasmon resonance to enable screening and characterization of antibody or variant libraries, including full kinetic profiles. The platform generates binding data for 384 proteins on one chip and can assay up to 1,152 patient samples in a single unattended run, the firms said.

Using 2 µL of patient serum, Carterra LSA generates insights with more than 120 data points, including a variant profile, ACE-2 blocking potential, and isotyping profiles of immunoglobin response, the firms added.

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