ABL to host CRP-Santé COMET subtyping tool within TherapyEdge servers

The licensing and distribution agreement allows ABL to directly host COMET (COntext-based Modeling for Expeditious Typing) subtyping tool developed at CRP-Santé within the TherapyEdge servers; it will mainly interact with the ViroScore Suite system to characterize HIV-1 virus subtypes.

“It offers our researchers and customers an additional approach of excellence to adequately characterize HIV-1 and other viruses with the ViroScore Suite system in our continuous efforts towards personalised medicine”

The COMET subtyping tool (http://comet.retrovirology.lu) is derived from the ppm compression algorithm and specifically adapted to nucleotide sequence scanning. It was presented by Mr Struck at the 8th European HIV Drug resistance workshop held in Sorrento, Italy (17-19 March 2010). He showed that the new CRP-Santé subtyping tool COMET is at least as reliable to predict HIV-1 subtype as existing approaches. The performance and scalability of the method allow it to be applied to high throughput sequence analysis. Thus, it can be applied to other viruses than HIV-1.

"It offers our researchers and customers an additional approach of excellence to adequately characterize HIV-1 and other viruses with the ViroScore Suite system in our continuous efforts towards personalised medicine," said Ronan Boulmé, Vice-President of ABL TherapyEdge Group. "We foresee new developments in viral hepatitis viruses and to apply it to pyrosequencing platforms. We are very pleased to license a technology developed at the Luxembourg Retrovirology Laboratory." CRP-Santé joins a growing number of international algorithms and expert systems licensed in for implementation on TherapyEdge servers.

"With this agreement, we reinforce our commitment that COMET will be used by more researchers across the World, especially the ones in developing countries with limited internet access but where various and complex HIV-1 subtypes are circulating. It will enhance our knowledge to improve COMET for future releases, bring additional partnerships and international exposure to the CRP-Santé technology and expertise," said Philippe De Backer, Technology Transfer Officer at CRP-Santé.

This agreement extends the collaboration between the two entities, as ABL was formed in 2001 as a CRP-Santé spin-off.

SOURC Advanced Biological Laboratories (ABL) S.A.