NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Canadian molecular diagnostics company Rna Diagnostics has been chosen to have its breast cancer assay evaluated by the Toronto Health Economics and Technology Assessment initiative in a multi-center clinical trial, the company said on Thursday.
The company's RNA Disruption Assay (RDA) was created to determine during the early stages of breast cancer treatment if a woman is responding to chemotherapy. Rna Diagnostics was one of three companies selected for evaluation in the MaRS Excellence in Clinical Innovation and Technology Evaluation (EXCITE) program, which is an evaluation platform that was created by the MaRS Discovery District center in Toronto to speed the movement of new medical tools into clinical care.
ApneaDx and Medtronic of Canada were also chosen to participate in EXCITE.
The MaRS program prioritizes technologies that it deems the best and most cost-effective, and aims to help them secure the evidence they need for federal licensing and adoption by the federal health system.
"Through EXCITE, the RDA technology will undergo rigorous testing to generate the right evidence to prepare it for reimbursement review and market adoption,” Leslie Levin, CSO of the EXCITE program, said in a statement.
Rna Diagnostics received a C$460,000 (US$455,000) in funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario earlier this year. In March 2012, the Ontario Genomics Institute invested about US$101,000 in the company to support further development of the RDA test.
On Rna Diagnostics' website, the company said that clinical trials for the RDA technology are in progress in North America and Europe, and the test will be commercially available as a testing service to cancer clinics sometime this year.