Proteomics Enters the COVID-19 Fight

SomaLogic has launched a new initiative to deploy their proteomic technology against the coronavirus pandemic. The company is making its proprietary SomaScan® Assay available to biopharma companies, academic medical investigators, and government entities working on COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 infection under simplified terms, with data from non-pharma studies to be shared rapidly and widely.

“We have one of the world’s most powerful platforms for understanding the biology of disease and health, and it is imperative that we put it to work on COVID-19,” said Roy Smythe, M.D. and SomaLogic’s Chief Executive Officer. “Urgent questions about how individuals respond differently to coronavirus infection, drug targets, drug efficacy and vaccine efficiency will only be answered quickly by bringing all available tools to bear on the challenge. Proteins are the targets of basically all drugs and are the structural and functional molecules that can provide human biology insights in real time. We uniquely bring a high-plex, clinical speed and scale proteomics capability to this mortal fight.”

The SomaScan Assay currently measures the levels of approximately 5000 proteins simultaneously in a small amount of biological sample. Profiling proteins at such a scale provides previously unattainable information about an individual’s current state of health and future risk of various health conditions and diseases, including infectious diseases like COVID-19. This information also indicates effective treatment approaches, including a way to focus new vaccine testing that can provide surrogate results without having to wait for new infections to arise.

For the purpose of these critical COVID-19 studies, SomaLogic is waiving many of their terms and conditions and offering to perform these studies on a “fee-for-service” basis to cover the basic costs of running the SomaScan Assay. At the same time, SomaLogic is seeking financial support from industry, charitable and governmental sources to help defray the costs and ensure that as many requests as possible for SomaScan Assay assistance can be met in a meaningful timeframe. “Our primary goals are to accelerate COVID-19 work wherever possible and to provide critical data to investigators on an expedited basis to help reduce the devastating human toll of the coronavirus pandemic,” said Smythe. “It’s simply unthinkable for us, or anyone else in this moment, to do otherwise.”