By Kirell Lakhman

CHICAGO — The University of California, San Francisco this fall plans to begin offering a homebrew version of Celera’s KIF6 gene assay, which is designed to identify patients at increased risk for congestive heart failure, according to a UCSF official.

Alan Wu, a professor of Laboratory Medicine at UCSF, said the school is in the process of “getting a license” to the assay from Celera, which would make it the second facility in the US to offer the test. Berkeley HeartLab, a part of Celera, is currently the only lab that offers the test.

“We’re negotiating with [Celera] right now,” he told The Sample following his presentation at the AACC’s annual conference, held here this week. “We’re trying to convince [Celera] that this test needs to be marketed, that it needs to be exposed because I think there’s going to be a lot of demand” for it.

Wu is also the chief of San Francisco General Hospital’s Clinical Chemistry Laboratory.

The KIF6 wild-type confers the added cardiovascular risk. The gene is “the most advanced marker in our service offerings," David Speechly, Celera's vice president of corporate affairs, told Sample sister publication Pharmacogenomics Reporter in April.

In November 2008, Pharmacogenomics Reporter reported that Celera had been in discussions with the FDA about registering a KIF6 test kit.

Published studies have shown that carriers of the KIF6 could be at a 55-percent increased risk for developing “coronary events.”

“Physicians can use the KIF6 test to identify the increased risk for congestive heart failure and begin treating their patients with statins,” Pharmacogenomics Reporter said.

Celera began offering the assay in March 2008 to a limited group of physicians and patients after BHL finished validating the laboratory-developed test. In January, Celera CEO Kathy Ordoñez said that as of the end of 2008 70,000 of the tests had been ordered, according to Sample sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News.

In June 2008, the San Francisco Business Journal reported that Celera had planned to “roll out [the assay] nationally next month.”