Ozette Technologies, Inc., a technology-driven life sciences company, today announced its partnership with Bloodworks Northwest, an independent, non-profit organization committed to saving lives through research
Bloodworks Bio will leverage the Ozette Lab, as well as Ozette’s proprietary immune cell population discovery and annotation platform to establish the ‘gold standard’ for blood donor candidates to advance cell therapies
SEATTLE– Sept. 1, 2023 – Ozette Technologies, Inc., a technology-driven life sciences company, today announced its partnership with Bloodworks Northwest, an independent, non-profit organization committed to saving lives through research, innovation, education and excellence in blood, medical and laboratory services.
This unique collaboration with Bloodworks Bio, a division of Bloodworks Northwest, aims to deeply profile and understand the immune systems of research donors to help drug developers engineer scalable “off-the-shelf” cell-based therapies and strengthen patients’ immune systems in fighting cancer and autoimmune diseases.
The donor blood used for this research is sourced from volunteer participants and is not associated with blood donations to Bloodworks Northwest, which provides lifesaving blood supply and services to 95% of Western Washington and Oregon hospitals.
Understanding diverse immune profiles remains a significant challenge as immune cell populations differ within and among potential research blood donors. Current methods of profiling donor blood cells lack the resolution to select the “good” cells while discarding the “bad.” The right raw materials–immune cells–are required to manufacture cell therapies strong enough to do the job, yet specific enough not to cause rejection.
“This partnership provides a unique opportunity to gain a detailed understanding of blood components that are required for therapeutic development by using Ozette’s state-of-the-art immunology lab and advanced computational technologies,” said Cherie Green, Vice President of Translational Sciences at Ozette. “We are very excited to partner with Bloodworks Northwest. Our teams share a commitment to faster and more effective development of life-saving therapeutics through deeper insights into blood products.”
The collaboration will focus on redefining the role of blood centers in the evolving landscape of cell therapy research and development. By harnessing the analytical power of Ozette’s single-cell profiling platform, a wide range of blood samples from healthy donors will be analyzed in detail to support biomedical research by Ozette’s Immunology Lab. This groundbreaking approach will dramatically shorten the timeline for profiling blood components, transforming months of work into mere hours.
“Today, there is no gold standard for what makes a candidate a good donor for cell therapy products. Cultivating diverse donor immune cell samples continues to be a huge challenge in the industry,” said Curt Bailey, President and CEO of Bloodworks Northwest. “Through this partnership with Ozette, we will be able to develop fully characterized blood products to better inform our programs, accelerate the development of our products, and improve overall outcomes. This is a revolutionary step for the future of cell therapy.”
By understanding and characterizing blood products in unprecedented detail, this collaboration paves the way for more efficient and effective therapeutic development. The anonymized immune data collected will serve to enrich the corpus of knowledge within the Ozette Platform™, promoting deeper future insights and analysis for partners where therapy developers will have the immune data necessary to select the best donors for their needs.
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About Ozette
Ozette Technologies, Inc. is a Seattle-based life sciences company committed to redefining the understanding of the immune system. By integrating innovative computational techniques, world-class data generation and a commitment to the highest quality science, Ozette is transforming the process of assay-to-insight in cellular immunology. Founded in 2020, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and incubated at the Allen Institute for AI, Ozette’s technologies have been published in several reputable scientific journals. To learn more about Ozette, please visit our website at www.ozette.com.
About Bloodworks Northwest
Bloodworks Northwest provides a lifesaving blood supply and services to 95% of Western Washington and Oregon hospitals. Since 1944, Bloodworks has served the Pacific Northwest as a local, nonprofit, independent, volunteer-supported and community-based blood center and research institute. Our Bloodworks Bio division offers a complete ecosystem of blood-based biological products and cellular therapy to support global biomedical research and discoveries. As experts in all things blood, Bloodworks Bio’s vision is to accelerate discoveries by providing comprehensive blood products, manufacturing services, and quality support for our biomedical and research partners in support of their research, clinical and commercial programs. Bloodworks Research Institute, the research division of Bloodworks Northwest, performs leading-edge research in blood biology, transfusion medicine, blood storage and treatment of blood disorders. Patients with traumatic injuries, undergoing surgeries or organ transplantation, or receiving treatment for cancer and blood disorders all depend on its services, expertise, laboratories and research. For more information, visit Bloodworksbio.org and bloodworksnw.org/research.