NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – HTG Molecular Diagnostics said today that it has licensed exclusive rights from Vancouver's Centre of Excellence for the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF Centre) to commercialize gene expression tests for prognosis of COPD patients who will experience frequent lung attacks.
HTG Molecular Diagnostics said it plans to use the PROOF Centre's testing technology to develop an assay on its qNPA platform, and that the Centre will help to clinically validate the test in Canada.
The center is a non-profit that is hosted by the University of British Columbia and Providence Health Care and is funded under the Canadian government's C$285 million (US$288 million) Centre of Excellence for Commercialization Program.
Lung attacks are the main cause of emergency room visits and hospitalizations among chronic disease sufferers and account for over C$5.7 billion in direct costs every year in Canada, the company said.
"The development of these blood tests has been driven by a huge unmet clinical and social need," PROOF Centre Director Bruce McManus said in a statement.
He said that the license agreement will help bring these prognostic tests to market faster and will improve patient care and alleviate the suffering of COPD patients by enabling doctors to tailor their treatments to match the patients' needs sooner.
HTG Molecular Diagnostics CEO TJ Johnson said the company hopes that this is the "first of many" agreements with the PROOF Centre that will result in new biomarker-based tests.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.