NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – CytoVas and BD Biosciences entered into a strategic alliance to develop a blood-based diagnostic test for predicting a patient's risk of heart attack and stroke.
Under the terms of the deal, announced on Thursday by CytoVas, the Philadelphia-based company will investigate the ability of the test, currently called the Vascular Health Profile, to evaluate cardiovascular disease progress. The test will also be assessed for its ability to determine the efficacy and side effects of existing and experimental medicines, CytoVas said. It added that studies aimed at several therapies are underway.
It and BD Biosciences, a division of Becton Dickinson, expect the alliance to last two years, after which they will consider options to obtain regulatory approval and reimbursement for the test.
Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease affects more than 82 million people in the US and is the leading cause of death in the developed world, CytoVas noted. Nonetheless, there are no reliable predictive measures that allow physicians to stratify an individual's risk of developing the disease and then to optimize treatment and management of the disease.
"I believe [the test] will become instrumental in guiding treatment decisions by helping us understand what is happening, in real time, at the actual site of a patient's atherosclerotic plaque," BD Biosciences Worldwide Vice President of Scientific Affairs Noel Warner said in a statement. "This could be instrumental in guiding clinical treatment as well as aiding industry as a biomarker or companion diagnostic for therapeutic innovation."
CytoVas is a biomarker discovery and development firm founded under the University of Pennsylvania Upstart incubator program by Emile Mohler, Jonni Moore, and Wade Rogers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Its Cytometric Fingerprinting technology automates pattern recognition of known cellular biomarkers of disease and treatment, it said.