La Jolla Institute for Immunology Acquires Carterra LSA Platform
La Jolla’s acquisition of Carterra’s LSA Platform is designed to advance their immunological and infectious disease research.
Carterra, a provider of technologies enabling high-throughput biology, and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), a non-profit entity focused on immunology studies, announced that LSJ acquired Cartera’s LSA antibody discovery and characterization platform on Aug. 1, 2022. LJI first worked with Carterra and the LSA platform on the Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium (CoVIC), a project that attempted to find the most potent antibodies against COVID-19.
The LSA platform is designed to enable rapid characterization of hundreds of antibodies in the early stages, then provide in-depth analysis of leads during later stages of discovery. According to a company press release, relative to traditional methods, the LSA generates results 100 times faster while using 99% less sample. In addition to autoimmune and cancer targets, it is also designed to enable rapid characterization of sera samples from vaccine studies.
“The LSA was key to mapping the epitope landscape of the SARS-CoV2 spike, using the 400 antibodies in the consortium. That information was instrumental to understanding which target sites are still effective against emerging variants of concern,” said Erica Ollmann Saphire, professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology, director of the CoVIC consortium, in the release. “Having seen what the LSA can do first-hand through our collaboration with Carterra as part of the CoVIC, we now look forward to using this instrument to propel our own discovery efforts.”
“We’re proud to see the benefit of Carterra’s LSA platform being brought to bear for global good,” says Tim Germann, chief commercial officer, Carterra, in the release. “Working with Erica and her team at LJI has been truly enlightening—they understand the importance of breaking down the old paradigm of slow and inefficient biologics discovery. Bringing the LSA to LJI represents their commitment to leading the effort to end the suffering from pandemics like Ebola and COVID-19.”
Source: Carterra
