Biomarker Commons

apceth GmbH & Co. KG, located in Munich, Germany, and Indivumed GmbH, based in Hamburg, Germany, have entered into a partnership for the development of a predominantly tissue-based biomarker strategy for the treatment of solid cancers with cellular and/or gene therapeutics. The goal is to predict the response of a targeted cellular/gene therapy in different cancer types and to stratify patients to provide a more individualized cancer treatment with apceth's innovative cell and cell-based gene therapeutics. A reliable biomarker platform will enable oncologists to identify those patients who will most likely benefit from the treatment with apceth's therapeutics, thus establishing a unique and truly personalized therapeutic approach adapted to the needs of each cancer patient.

Selventa, a biomarker discovery company that enables personalized healthcare through the stratification of patients based on disease-driving mechanisms, recently announced a US patent that relates methods and techniques that facilitate discovery of biomarkers, thus aiding in the development of predictive and prognostic diagnostic tests for therapeutics targeting complex multi-factorial diseases.

HistoRx recently licensed from Yale University a new clinical diagnostic assay based on AQUA technology. This assay enables doctors treating patients with melanoma to identify a subset of those patients who, despite having no detectable cancer in their lymph nodes, have a 40% risk of recurrence of their disease. AQUA technology is an automated, quantitative IHC testing method that enables measurement of protein biomarkers in tissue as an aid to a pathologist's diagnosis. Such precise determination of first, the location within the tumor cell and second, the amount in each location is not possible with conventional testing methods, such as standard immunohistochemistry (IHC).

Selventa, a personalized healthcare company focused on stratification of patients and development of predictive biomarker panels based on disease-driving mechanisms, today announced that it has formed a strategic scientific alliance with Linguamatics, a software solutions company that provides knowledge extraction through its innovative I2E natural language processing (NLP) text mining platform. The alliance will bring together established analytical capabilities of both companies to efficiently extract complex life science knowledge in a computable, structured, biological expression language (BEL) format that can be used to interpret large-scale experimental data in the context of published literature.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Goettingen, Germany, led by Prof. Hannelore Ehrenreich, the University of Bremen and University of Hannover, in collaboration with Dr. Andreas Jeromin at Banyan Biomarkers, Inc, in Alachua, FL, have identified a panel of protein-based blood biomarkers in patients treated with erythropoietin (EPO), which correlate with positive outcome in this study.