Virus Screening

Viral infections of the CNS can be caused by a variety of viruses. The two most important diseases are viral meningitis and viral encephalitis. To date, some of these viral infections of the CNS are not treatable.

Our ViraSense technology can be applied to identify new lead compounds to treat specific viral infections as well as clinical drug resistance testing in the context of such infections.

ViraSense for high-throughput screening

For pharmaceutical companies, the ViraSense platform represents a promising tool to accelerate high-throughput screening projects aiming to identify novel lead candidates. Revvity’s gene delivery portfolio, where SIRION Biotech’s expertise lives on, offers this novel AAV-based platform screening assay in collaboration and for licensing.

The ViraSense platform is capable of determining the effectiveness of a given compound against a variety of human viruses:

• Human Adenoviruses
• HSV-1
• HSV-2
• HCMV

The ViraSense platform can potentially be extended to other human DNA viruses with AAV helper function (HPV16, VZV, human herpesviruses HHV6, 7).
This technology facilitates and accelerates evaluation of new compounds within primary and secondary compound screening. Its benefits are:

• Parallel screening of multiple compounds on one plate
• Lower costs compared with e.g. PCR
• No need for PCR or assay optimization
• No need to label cells or viruses
• Can be used for a variety of viruses and is not sensitive to virus mutations.

Furthermore, Revvity’s gene delivery team has established an academic clinical network providing access to clinical virus strains that can be used in this assay.