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CRUK's Commercial Branch, Abcodia Launch Cancer Biomarker Collaboration

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Cancer Research UK's commercial arm, Cancer Research Technology (CRT), will partner with the biomarker validation firm Abcodia to develop blood tests for detecting early-stage cancers, CRUK said today.

The collaborators will harness Abcodia's longitudinal biomarker profiling expertise and CRUK's scientific network. They will have access to more than five million serum samples contained in the UK Collaborative Trial for Ovarian Cancer Screening at University College London. That trial, which has taken samples from people who were healthy for as long as 10 years before some of them were diagnosed with cancer, is funded in part by CRUK.

CRT and UK-based Abcodia plan to use this sample collection to select biomarkers that provide clear indicators for changes in the early stages of disease.

They will focus their attention on markers that may be expressed in serum, such as proteins, microRNAs, DNA methylation, cell derived vesicles, and autoantibody markers, and they will investigate both genetic and acquired risk factors.

The collaborators also plan to jointly commercialize any biomarkers they discover and to share the resulting revenues with any third-party partners through license arrangements.

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