In the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, BioCopy worked closely with the virology department of the University Clinic Freiburg on the development of a biosensor for a cost-efficient and rapid determination of immune status - BISKUIT for short.
Funded by the state of Baden-Württemberg, BISKUIT started in 2020 and has finished with great success. Not only can specific antibodies against Sars-CoV-2 epitopes now be detected reliably, it is also possible to differentiate between mutations of Sars-CoV-2 (viral variants) and other coronaviruses. With the help of the new biosensor, antibodies can be characterized further and the full patient-specific immune statue can be determined including the immune protection of this person's antibodies.
Over the course of eight months, BioCopy performed measurements to determine the immunity against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants. BioCopy worked with serum samples from COVID-19 recovered patients and people immunized with different vaccines. These samples were analyzed for approximately 100 mutants of SARS-COV2. Other than standard methods, BioCopy's method only requires about 50µl of serum from the patients' blood to arrive at a detailed and high quality analysis of this person's acute protection against different SARS-CoV-2 variants.
As the industrial partner of the collaboration, BioCopy’s focus of interest was the development of an automated platform for point of care diagnostics and the generation of antigen microarrays for serological diagnostics. Now it is possible to characterize a person's SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies to evaluate their individual immune status, fast, label-free and with minimal sample quantity.