VaxEffect Test Can Determine Immune Response to COVID-19 Vaccination in Patients With Cancer

A new vaccination immune response monitoring platform is going beyond a simple “Yes/No” and providing clinicians and patients more quantitative data regarding immune response to COVID-19 vaccination. The test could be especially beneficial for immunocompromised patients by informing timing for boosters down the road.

VaxEffect, created by FlowMetric Life Sciences, Inc., just recently launched. Renold Capocasale, CEO and founder of FlowMetric, and Grant Morgan, PhD, PMP, executive vice president for FlowMetric and general manager of VaxEffect, spoke this week on the platform, its clinical application, and future plans for immune response tests for other vaccines beyond COVID-19.

“The VaxEffect test, built with different technology on flow cytometry, is able to actually detect not only were you infected with the COVID-19 virus or created an immune response to the vaccine, but also the level of immune response that you were able to generate in response to either prior infection or to the vaccine,” said Morgan.

Transcription:

Morgan: What we're seeing with immunocompromised people, including people who have suffered from various different types of cancer, is that the immune response to the vaccine they receive is very varied. Some patients actually generate strong immune responses and, therefore, could be considered to be protected from the virus in going forward in their everyday lives.

But what they are seeing in both oncology specialties, but also for organ transplantation, diabetes, geriatric specialties, [is] that people have a reduced response to the vaccine they receive. And with regular serology tests not based on our platform of flow cytometry, they are actually getting results that say they are not generating any kind of immune response. But because the flow cytometry platform that we utilize for the VaxEffect test is so sensitive, we are actually able to identify a positive but weak immune response to the vaccine they received, which means there is a potential for a booster shot to actually increase that initial immune response that they generated.

VaxEffect is different to other tests on the market, specifically serology tests, in that a majority of them are over a very small dynamic range, which means that they can only give you really a qualitative result of ‘Yes, you've been infected or vaccinated and created an immune response,’ or ‘No, you haven't.’ The VaxEffect test, built with different technology on flow cytometry, is able to actually detect not only were you infected with the COVID-19 virus or created an immune response to the vaccine, but also the level of immune response that you were able to generate in response to either prior infection or to the vaccine.

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