AI and bioinformatics company Ardigen SA said on Thursday that it has entered a research collaboration with New Zealand-based CVC (COVID-19 Vaccine Corporation) aimed at developing a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Ardigen's neoantigen prediction platform, ArdImmune Vax, uses bioinformatics and AI to identify an optimal set of neoantigens as targets for cancer vaccines or adoptive cell therapies. This technology is also well suited for the design of vaccines for infectious diseases. The core of the platform is a proprietary algorithm capable of predicting neoantigens' probability to elicit an immune response.

CVC will benefit from Ardigen's vaccine design technology by selecting which viral epitopes are the most suitable to boost cellular immune response. Complementing humoral and cellular response in the vaccine design is expected to result in two strong lines of defense against the coronavirus, Ardigen explained.

This approach is thought to be more effective than vaccines designed to create antibodies alone.