Biomarker Commons

Genomind, a personalized medicine company, has released a statement in response to the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH) announcement by Director Dr. Thomas Insel that the organization will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories, supporting the move and its potential to influence improved treatment of patients with mental disorders.

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.

Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) recently announced it has acquired two investigational positron emission tomography (PET) tracers from Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc. The tracers are intended to image tau (or neurofibrillary) tangles in the brain, one of two known hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. Based on studies of samples obtained at autopsy, the amount and location of tau tangles in an Alzheimer's disease patient's brain is thought to correlate with the severity of the disease.

Oxford Cancer Biomarkers Ltd (OCB), the UK-based company developing tests that allow medicines to be personalised for the benefit of the cancer patient, recently announced an agreement with AstraZeneca for biomarker discovery, with the potential for further collaboration on validation and development of resulting biomarkers.

OCB will work with an undisclosed AstraZeneca cancer drug to discover biomarkers that have the potential to predict responders and non-responders to the drug. Under the agreement, AstraZeneca has been granted an option to license biomarkers from the programme.

bioTheranostics’ CancerTYPE® ID molecular cancer classifier demonstrated superior accuracy compared with immunohistochemistry (IHC) in identifying the primary site in difficult-to-diagnose metastatic tumors. The comparative effectiveness study, which was published recently in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, is the first comprehensive investigation to directly compare the diagnostic accuracy of the two tumor classification techniques.

Matrix-Bio Inc., a diagnostics company that uses metabolite profiling to detect cancer and other diseases, recently signed an exclusive global licensing and marketing agreement for metabolomic biomarkers with Quest Diagnostics (NYSE: DGX).