CORONA VACCINATIONS AFTER NTX

Together with the innovative Mainz-based biotechnology company BioNTech, the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at Heidelberg University Hospital and employees of the Heidelberg Kidney Center at the UKL-HD, the world's first clinical study on corona vaccinations in kidney transplant patients has been initiated.

The partner BioNTech, now internationally renowned for its leading role in the search for a vaccine against the coronavirus, has specialized in individualized immunotherapies since its foundation in 2008.

The use of bioinformatics is one of the decisive factors in the development of individualized therapies. Scalable and robust bioinformatics processes enable a validated patient-centered process by applying complex algorithms to the data of our real-life patients. This is where BioNTech convinces with its extensive experience through ongoing immunotherapeutic research, including clinical studies.

The messenger RNA vaccine developed by BioNTech for the prevention of COVID-19 infection belongs to the popularly known group of inactivated vaccines. It works according to the concept of allowing the vaccinated organism to produce the vaccine antigens itself. This means that the mRNA vaccine does not contain the live or attenuated virus, but only selected variants of its viral genes in the form of nucleic acids, which serve as building instructions for the human cells. This special vaccine therefore induces a 90% potent humoral and cellular immune response. Due to this mode of action, the vaccine also has an intrinsically released adjuvant, so no vaccine booster is necessary, making this active ingredient ideally qualified for our clinical trial on high-risk candidates:

The "Corona Vaccination NTX" study, which started on Friday, January 1, 2021 at the Heidelberg Kidney Center, is now in phase I of recruitment of study participants to investigate how the drug affects the transplant in terms of safety and tolerability. The small cohort of our study participants (N = 10) is being monitored intensively and continuously by the research team, consisting of physicians, biologists and bioinformaticians, taking into account the latest findings and data.