NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – JPT Peptide Technologies and The Institute for Medical Immunology at the Charite in Berlin announced on Wednesday an agreement to develop serological peptide biomarkers for the differential diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome.
Under the terms of the deal, JPT will combine its high-content peptide microarray technology with the institute's expertise in diagnosing patients with chronic fatigue syndrome in order to discover biomarkers that can be developed into diagnostic tools.
The ailment is a debilitating and complex disorder that is diagnosed primarily by eliminating other diseases with similar symptoms, JPT and the institute said, and with no diagnostic test yet on the market, definitively diagnosing chronic fatigue syndrome remains challenging.
Carmen Scheibenbogen, head of the project team at Charite, said that preliminary results from research being conducted at the institute using JPT technology is providing optimism that distinct serological biomarkers may be discovered, which will allow for the better diagnosis and treatment of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.
JPT CEO Holger Wenschuh added in a statement, "The previous success of our peptide microarray platform technology in identifying seromarkers in HIV, autoimmune diseases, and cancer has led to this exciting opportunity to use our arrays to systematically explore other indications with high and unmet diagnostic and therapeutic need."
The work by the two partners is supported partially by Pro Fit, a funding program of the Investitionsbank Berlin, and by the European Union.
Based in Berlin, JPT is a wholly owned subsidiary of BioNTech and provides services and tools for peptide-related projects.