Shares in biotechnology company Oxford Biodynamics (OBD:AIM) shot 23% higher to 79p on Thursday after it announced its proprietary EpiSwitch platform technology had been selected to profile COVID-19 patients.
The University of Glasgow study forms part of a series of projects aimed at increasing the understanding of the coronavirus. The company, which was spun-out of Oxford University in 2007, has developed technology which enables pharmaceutical companies to accelerate and improve drug discovery and development.
The EpiSwitch platform provides biomarkers which indicate the presence of a particular a disease, and have the capability to identify patients who will benefit from immune treatments because they are of particular risk to severe overreaction of the immune system.
Professor Carl Goodyear at the University of Glasgow commented, ‘it is essential that we have the ability to rapidly stratify individuals into those that will progress to severe disease, and those that will respond to available therapies. Evaluation of the immunological set-point via EpiSwitchTM will provide that much needed stratification tool.’
