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Cytox, Mayo Clinic Team Up to Study Alzheimer's Disease Assays

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Cytox said today that it has signed a research collaboration deal with the Mayo Clinic to further develop its polygenic risk scoring approach for the diagnosis and prognosis of Alzheimer's disease and other neurological conditions.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cytox will both test its current, commercially available technology — which runs on the Thermo Fisher Scientific GeneTitan platform — and will explore new, undisclosed approaches that are under development. The Mayo Clinic's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center will provide biobanked samples representing research subjects with different neurologic disease states and associated PET imaging data. Cytox's US genotyping services partner, AKESOgen, will genotype the samples.

"The Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's biobank presents a tremendous research opportunity, not only due to the thousands of blood samples it holds, but also because of the clinical annotation accompanying the samples," Cytox CEO Richard Pither said in a statement. "We hope to further validate the performance of our current approaches for assessing genetic risk for developing Alzheimer's disease, and develop new, more targeted, precision-based methods."

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