biomarkers

Viewing posts tagged biomarkers

07 Mar 2017

GRAIL Raises $900M to Develop Early Blood Tests for Cancer

By Jay Goth

GRAIL is combining what it calls high-intensity (ultrabroad and ultradeep) sequencing and population-based clinical trials to characterize circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in healthy individuals and cancer patients. The ultimate aim is to develop cancer diagnostics that can detect tumors early enough to cure the disease. See the full story at Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

New Article in GEN


This is a core focus for all precision medicine oncology approaches, including ours. We believe that a multi-omic focus that goes beyond circulating tumor cells can have major advantages.

23 Feb 2017

Ebola Biomarker Discovery

By Jay Goth

A team of researchers led by Boston University, the University of Liverpool, Public Health England, and other international agencies has discovered a biomarker that can help predict the progression of the Ebola disease: a handful of genes that are overactivated in patients who succumb to the disease.

The research, funded by the United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health Research and the US Food and Drug Administration, and published on January 19, 2017, in the journal Genome Biology, suggests a new type of blood test that while still in the preliminary stages of development, might be useful in future outbreaks to steer patients to the best treatment.

“We can get a sense of who will survive and who won’t, and we can get it earlier. This is the first study of this type ever done on this scale.”

– John Connor, a School of Medicine associate professor of microbiology at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories

Get the full story at Science Blog

20 Feb 2017

The Importance of microRNAs

By Jay Goth

New Article in GEN Explores miRNA

After advances to genomics and transcriptomics technology, scientists have realized that about 98% of the genome contains sequences that perform key regulatory functions. Some of these sequences give rise to microRNAs (miRNAs), small noncoding RNA molecules that have emerged as one of the most complex, multilayered, and intriguing constituents of gene-regulatory networks.

“The future is bright for the diagnostic use of microRNAs”

– Christos Argyropoulos, M.D., Ph.D.

“The goal in biomarker development is to use microRNA expression-based biomarkers to better manage the clinical treatment of cancer,” declares Dr. Jingfang Ju,Ph.D., professor of pathology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Historically, mRNA expression, DNA mutations, and proteins have been used as the most common biomarkers.

Expanding the biomarker universe to create new diagnostic and treatment solutions is critical to improving the human condition and a main focus of Forentis Fund. To read the whole article in GEN, click here.

06 Feb 2017

Lipidomics – an important ‘omic modality

By Jay Goth

Lipidomics is a new frontier of ‘omics research and offers much promise for new-generation biomarkers for common complex phenotypes. According to a white paper from the Computational and Structural Biology Laboratory, Division of Biological Sciences and Engineering, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Dwarka, India, traditional clinical markers for prognosis of hyperlipidemic individuals are inadequate to forecast or diagnose cardiac events.

The white paper describes attributes from lipidomics that can help identify risk of future cardiac events and other areas of concern. It concludes that additional studies are required to establish the range of normal and disease levels of the identified lipids in different populations and conditions and that lipidomics deserves greater research attention from the biomarker and precision medicine research communities.

You can read an abstract of the report here. Lipidomics is one of the many ‘omics modalities being investigated by Blueprint Bio.

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