NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) — PredictImmune announced today that it has received a £100,000 ($126,368) grant from Innovate UK to investigate the use of its PredictSure IBD inflammatory bowel disease test to guide patient treatment decisions.
The test, a 15-biomarker quantitative PCR panel that runs on Roche's LightCycler instrument, is used to stratify patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis based on the severity of their illness. It received CE marking earlier this month and is set to launch in January.
With the Innovate UK award, Cambridge, UK-based PredictImmune said it will conduct a feasibility study examining the use of biomarkers to predict IBD patient response to new and existing treatments. The company said the trial is expected to lay the groundwork for future studies run in collaboration with undisclosed pharmaceutical partners.
"The commercially driven feasibility studies using our prognostic test for IBD … will identify which patients will benefit from the early use of more aggressive treatments and which treatment they will best respond to," PredictImmune CEO Paul Kinnon said in a statement. "The study takes us a step closer to achieving our goal of personalized medicine in IBD."
In April, PredictImmune said it received £4.3 million from the Wellcome Trust to evaluate the use of its test to guide therapy in 400 Crohn's disease patients across the UK. It also recently launched a joint study with the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation to generate additional data on PredictSure IBD.