April 21, 2008, Rockville, MD--Theranostics Health has received an exclusive license from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to commercialize microdissection including laser capture microdissection (LCM) combined with protein analysis for cancer diagnostics and companion diagnostics. Under the terms of the agreement, Theranostics Health will pay NIH the customary license issue royalties, minimum annual royalties, benchmark and earned royalties upon successful commercialization of the technology.
According to the company, Theranostics was founded on the vision of shaping a new paradigm in disease management with two primary and complementary goals; arming physicians with accurate diagnostic tests so that they can tailor treatment based on the individual patient's aberrant signaling profile and enabling drug developers to better stratify clinical cohorts in clinical trials to efficiently develop safer and more effective drugs.
"Existing methods of genomic and proteomic tissue profiling analysis that do not rely on LCM have been shown to produce inaccurate and possibly misleading results, arising from heterogeneity of tissues and variation in cellular compositions between samples and within different regions of a tissue sample," says Lance Liotta, co-founder and chief medical officer of Theranostics. "This licensed technology allows us to precisely collect and analyze the specific cells of interest from patient samples."
"But this is only the first step," adds Emanuel Petricoin, co-founder and chief scientific officer. "Our unique signaling pathway profiling platform allows the activity of theranostic biomarkers of interest to be quantitatively measured from microdissected patient samples. With this technology and our experience and expertise in disease signaling pathways, we are discovering new ways of more effectively treating patients with existing drugs and treating patients who are resistant to their current therapies."