NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — Nanogen has licensed genetic markers related to schizophrenia and to antipsychotic drug response from Australia’s Co-Operative Research Centre for Diagnostics and Queensland University of Technology.
Nanogen said it will use the markers to develop diagnostics for schizophrenia and “related conditions,” and said that some of the markers may be useful in predicting adverse drug reactions. The company said these markers have been linked to the disease “in a number of clinical studies.”
Financial terms of the agreement were not released.
Nanogen President and COO David Ludvigson said that effective schizophrenia diagnostics and treatments may “require multiplexed analytic methods capable of examining multiple genes simultaneously” because the disease may be caused by mutations in multiple genes.
The genetic component of schizophrenia may account for between 65 percent and 80 percent of the risk for the disease.