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Denovo Biomarkers, ALS-ETF Partner on ALS Drug Development Efforts

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The ALS Emergency Treatment Fund and Denovo Biomarkers today announced a partnership to evaluate Denovo's technology to identify patients who may best respond to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis drugs being studied.

The partnership will use Denovo's pharmacogenomic technology in order to identify biomarkers from biological samples from expanded access programs sponsored by ALS-ETF. Biomarkers which can be correlated with patient response to treatments may then be used to identify patient subsets for subsequent trials, the partners said.

The San Diego-based company said that is provides novel biomarker approaches to personalized drug development work and offers a platform and algorithm for de novo genomic biomarker discovery with archived clinical samples. According to its website, its technology can be used on plasma samples to identify genetic biomarkers by "scanning the entire human genome and conducting a proprietary data analysis developed internally."

In a statement, Denovo CSO Wen Luo said, "This partnership leverages the mission of ALS-ETF and the broad utility of our platform. We hope that our combined efforts will lead to better, more targeted treatments for ALS."

ALS-ETF, headquartered in San Francisco, is a non-profit that provides near-term treatment options to ALS patients.

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