Cellecta, Inc. today announced the release of the DriverMap™ Adaptive Immune Receptor (AIR) TCR and BCR Kits, a family of NGS-based multiplex-PCR assays that profile up to all seven cell receptors T (TCR) and B cell receptor (BCR) chains from the same sample, in a single tube, without the need for specialized equipment.
From a variety of immune sample type inputs – whole blood, tissue biopsies, FFPE and more – DriverMap AIR kits use functionally validated primer sets that target the third complementarity determining region (CDR3) highly heavy chain variable of the respective Tand B-cellular receptors, together with reagents for multiplex PCR, to produce NGS-ready libraries. Subsequent sequencing and analysis identifies antigen-activated clonotypes that can provide insight into the adaptive immune response and are useful for a wide range of therapeutic and diagnostic applications.
“While there are many immune receptor profiling options available on the market today, none provide the comprehensive, highly sensitive and quantifiable results provided by the DriverMap AIR TCR and BCR assays. With this technology, we are excited to provide researchers with an effective tool to aid in their efforts to discover and validate novel predictive and prognostic biomarkers of immunity,” said Alex Chenchik, Ph.D., President and scientific director of Cellecta.
The highly reproducible Driver-Map™ AIR test represents several significant improvements over competitive tests.
• Unbiased and cost-effective profiling of all TCR/BCR mRNA isoforms in a single assay and quantitative coverage of the immune receptor repertoire of abundant clonotypes from whole blood, PBMC, FFPE, tissues or purified immune cells.
• Reproducible quantitative analysis of functional, productive, and abundant AIR clonotypes using Universal Molecular Index (UMI) technology.
• Specific profiling of the AIR repertoire without background of primer-dimer and off-target amplification products.
In addition to the DriverMap AIR kits, Cellecta continues to provide the DriverMap AIR profiling test as a service for employees working in a variety of therapeutic areas. Researchers send their immune cell samples to Cellecta and receive quantitative clonotype data and an analysis report generated by the MiXCR software in just a few weeks.