Biomarker Commons

The Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), a landmark biomarker clinical study, has completed enrollment of its initial 600-member cohort of Parkinson's patients and controls, and will launch additional study cohorts to leverage the existing PPMI infrastructure and evaluate multiple potential biomarkers for Parkinson's disease (PD). The first of these new cohorts launches today and will investigate risk factors for PD that may enable diagnosis before the onset of motor symptoms.

Dr. Tom Hudson, President and Scientific Director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) recently announced a collaboration with Janssen Inc. to find and test new biomarkers to identify patients with hormone resistant prostate cancer at high risk for disease progression and biomarkers of response to therapy. These biomarkers could lead to more personalized treatments and fewer side effects for prostate cancer patients.

Australian scientists are much closer to developing a screening test for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease. They identified blood-based biological markers that are associated with the build up of a toxic protein in the brain which occurs years before symptoms appear and irreversible brain damage has occurred.

The AgedBrainSYSBIO project on systems biology of synapse proteins & ageing was officially launched recently in Paris, France. AgedBrainSYSBIO is a European collaborative research project funded by the European Commission under the Health Work Programme of the 7th Framework Programme. This multidisciplinary consortium assembles 14 academic and industrial internationally renowned research teams from Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Israel, United Kingdom and Switzerland.

The Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), a landmark biomarker clinical study, has completed enrollment of its initial 600-member cohort of Parkinson’s patients and controls, and will launch additional study cohorts to leverage the existing PPMI infrastructure and evaluate multiple potential biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease (PD). The first of these new cohorts launches today and will investigate risk factors for PD that may enable diagnosis before the onset of motor symptoms.

Veridex, LLC (Veridex) recently announced that the first study of the company's next-generation circulating tumor cell (CTC) technology, developed in collaboration with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), has been published in Science Translational Medicine. The collaboration, initially announced in January 2011, has led to the development of a next-generation CTC (or "liquid biopsy") technology that offers enhanced specificity and sensitivity and enables more extensive characterization of captured cells.