Biomarker Commons

Recently, the Journal of the American Heart Association published conclusive results from a study directed by Dr. Éric Thorin of the Montreal Heart Institute (MHI), which suggests for the first time that a blood protein contributes to the early development of atherosclerosis.

As we've done in previous years here at Biomarker Commons (AACR 2011 and AACR 2012), here's a roundup of eight research studies on cancer biomarkers that were presented last month at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

When Colin Hill’s father was diagnosed with later-stage prostate cancer last summer, he was treated the same as every other patient with the illness.

This standardized approach bothered Hill, who believes medicine should approach each patient’s illness as unique, with medication tailored to the person’s history and biology.

“You show up to the hospital, and it’s like Groundhog Day,” Hill said, with patients being cared for the same way, over and over again. “It’s this outdated standard of care created for this hypothetical average patient. But no one’s an average patient.”

The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and the Ontario Genomics Institute (OGI) recently announced that Dr. Lincoln Stein, OICR’s Program Leader, Informatics and Bio-computing, has been awarded $250,000 through Genome Canada’s Bioinformatics and Computational Biology competition, in partnership with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Dr. Stein and his colleague Dr. Guanming Wu, aim to develop software that will improve the treatment of cancer patients by enabling physicians to study and visualize the genomic aberrations of individual patients.

Adaptive Biotechnologies recently announced that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Bristol-Myers Squibb for the discovery of immunological biomarkers in oncology.

Exosome Diagnostics, a leading developer of biofluid-based molecular diagnostic products for use in personalized medicine research and clinical diagnostics, recently presented data at the American Urological Association Annual Meeting in San Diego demonstrating the performance of urine exosome technology in accurately predicting the outcome of a prostate biopsy.