Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

Exiqon Inks Exclusive Prostate Cancer Biomarker Deal With Aarhus University Hospital

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Exiqon yesterday announced that it has exclusively licensed two sets of microRNA-based prostate cancer biomarkers from Denmark's Aarhus University Hospital.

One biomarker profile relates to urine-based, non-invasive diagnosis of prostate cancer; the other set of biomarkers comes from tissue samples and is relevant to patient stratification for improved treatment selection. Exiqon said in a statement that it will validate the biomarkers in both retrospective and prospective studies.

Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Exiqon CFO Hans Christensen told GenomeWeb in an email that the patient stratification biomarkers are complementary to epigenetic markers acquired from Aarhus University Hospital in 2014 in a separate exclusive licensing agreement. The biomarkers could be used to develop a test that can help avoid overtreatment of non-aggressive prostate cancer, he said.

The Scan

Genetic Ancestry of South America's Indigenous Mapuche Traced

Researchers in Current Biology analyzed genome-wide data from more than five dozen Mapuche individuals to better understand their genetic history.

Study Finds Variants Linked to Diverticular Disease, Presents Polygenic Score

A new study in Cell Genomics reports on more than 150 genetic variants associated with risk of diverticular disease.

Mild, Severe Psoriasis Marked by Different Molecular Features, Spatial Transcriptomic Analysis Finds

A spatial transcriptomics paper in Science Immunology finds differences in cell and signaling pathway activity between mild and severe psoriasis.

ChatGPT Does As Well As Humans Answering Genetics Questions, Study Finds

Researchers in the European Journal of Human Genetics had ChatGPT answer genetics-related questions, finding it was about 68 percent accurate, but sometimes gave different answers to the same question.