Theranostics Health to commercialize microdissection technology from NIH

Apr 21 2008

Theranostics Health announced that it 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.

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.

Dr. Lance Liotta, co-inventor of the technology, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of the Company said, "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. 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," according to Dr. Emanuel F. Petricoin, co-inventor of the technology, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of the Company, "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."

"This exclusive license allows Theranostics Health to commercially develop companion diagnostics for treatment decision and monitoring, providing direct benefit to patients as well as building significant value for our shareholders," added the Company's President and CEO, Dr. Danong Chen.