NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – CareDx and French medical technology firm Cibiltech announced today that they are partnering to commercialize Predigraft, a data analysis tool that provides an early prediction of an individual's risk of allograft rejection and transplant loss.
Under the terms of the agreement, CareDx will hold the exclusive rights to commercialize Predigraft in the US and will also become a minority equity owner of Cibiltech. The companies have also agreed to collaborate to advance the development of artificial intelligence in transplant care.
Specific financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Predigraft was developed from Cibiltech's proprietary software algorithm iBox, which was developed using outcomes data from tens of thousands of transplant patients, CareDx said.
"We are delighted to collaborate with CareDx, as it is a very promising step to bring years of work on artificial intelligence from the Paris Transplant Group to transplant patients. Our technology has been selected by numerous peer-reviewed publications, and we believe that the team at CareDx is a great partner to make this available to the field of transplantation," Alexandre Loupy, iBox inventor and Cibiltech founding partner, said in a statement.
Last week, Brisbane, California-based CareDx announced that it had agreed to acquire organ transplant patient tracking software provider OTTR Complete Transplant Management for $16 million in cash. Omaha, Nebraska-based OTTR provides software for transplant patient management, which is currently used in more than 60 transplant centers in the US.
"CareDx has taken another step towards bringing big data solutions to transplant patients," CareDx CEO Peter Maag said in a statement on the news of the Predigraft deal. "With OTTR providing data infrastructure and with iBox providing prognostic information, we are beginning to assemble new and important solutions for caregivers that are based on artificial intelligence."
CareDx — which markets a blood-based donor-derived cell-free DNA (dd-cfDNA) test called Allosure for the assessment of transplant organ health — recently expanded the assay from kidney to lung transplant patients. The firm made AlloSure available to lung transplant patients in February under a compassionate use program, while it conducts clinical studies to make AlloSure Lung an official part of its transplant diagnostic product portfolio.
The company also markets a heart transplant diagnostic test called AlloMap, and launched a comprehensive rejection surveillance diagnostic for heart transplant recipients in April 2018 called HeartCare that combined AlloMap with AlloSure for the heart. CareDx said the combined product would provide a holistic view into the health of heart transplant recipients and give clinicians a clearer picture of patients' immune system activity and graft health.
In an interview with GenomeWeb in February, Maag said there are also several other settings in which the company is exploring the utility of dd-cfDNA testing, including pancreatic transplantation and bone marrow transplantation to detect graft-versus-host disease.