Cellecta, Inc. today announced the launch of the DriverMap™ Adaptive Immune Receptor (AIR) TCR and BCR kits, a family of multiplex-PCR, NGS-based assays that enable profiling of up to all seven T-cell receptor (TCR) and B-cell receptor (BCR) chains from the same sample, in a single tube, without need of specialized equipment.
Starting from a variety of immune sample type inputs—whole blood, tissue biopsies, FFPE and more—the DriverMap AIR kits use functionally validated primer sets which target the highly variable third complementarity determining region (CDR3) of the heavy chain of the respective Tand B-cell receptors, along with reagents for multiplex PCR, to yield NGS-ready libraries. Subsequent sequencing and analysis identify antigen-activated clonotypes which can provide insight into the adaptive immune response and is useful for a wide range of therapeutic and diagnostic applications.
“While there are numerous immune receptor profiling options available on the market today, there are none that provide the comprehensive, highly sensitive and quantifiable results provided by the DriverMap AIR TCR and BCR assays. With this technology, we are pleased to provide researchers with an efficient tool to aid their efforts in discovering and validating novel predictive and prognostic immunity biomarkers,” said Alex Chenchik, Ph.D., president and chief scientific officer of Cellecta.
The highly reproducible Driver-Map™ AIR assay represents several important improvements over competitor assays.
• Unbiased, cost-effective profiling of all TCR/BCR mRNA isoforms in a single assay and quantitative immune receptor repertoire coverage of abundant clonotypes from whole blood, PBMC, FFPE, tissue or purified immune cells.
• Reproducible, quantitative analysis of functional, productive, abundant AIR clonotypes using universal molecular index (UMI) technology.
• Specific profiling of AIR repertoire without background of primer-dimer and offtarget amplification products.
In addition to the DriverMap AIR kits, Cellecta continues to provide the DriverMap AIR Profiling assay as a service for collaborators working in a variety of therapeutic areas. Researchers send Cellecta their immune cell samples and receive quantitative clonotype data and an analysis report generated by MiXCR software in just a few weeks.
