NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) - PrognosDx Health has signed an exclusive, worldwide license for the patent rights associated with epigenetics technology developed at the University of California, Los Angeles, the company said today.
The technology, developed by Siavash Kurdistani and David Seligson at UCLA, is based on the predictive power of global histone modification patterns and "has broad potential uses in the development of cancer prognostic assays including response predictions to therapeutics as well as research tools and reagents," PrognosDx said in a statement.
Kurdistani said in a statement that his team has demonstrated that global histone modification patterns can predict a higher risk of prostate cancer recurrence as well as clinical outcome in both lung and kidney cancer patients.
PrognosDx plans to use the technology to develop products for characterizing aggressive versus non-aggressive tumors, and predicting treatment response to certain anti-cancer drugs.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.