NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – BG Medicine today announced a collaboration with Boston Scientific to study whether galectin-3 can be used to screen patients for cardiac-resynchronization therapy.
Data for their effort will come from the MADIT-CRT study, the world's largest randomized study of New York Heart Association Class I and II patients. The study involves more than 1,800 patients enrolled in 110 centers worldwide.
The focus of the collaboration is to better understand the MADIT-CRT patient population and determine whether galectin-3 can help identify patients who would benefit from CRT, BG Medicine said.
Today, patients are selected for CRT based on current cardiac status, not on how disease is expected to progress, Pieter Muntendam, president and CEO of BG Medicine, said in a statement. "Elevated galectin-3 is associated with poor outcomes, and this collaboration aims to investigate the role galectin-3 can play in identifying those who stand to gain most by early use of CRTs," he said.
BG's galectin-3 assay received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration in November.
As part of the agreement, BG Medicine's capabilities will be used to discover other biomarkers that may correlate to CRT treatment response.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.