Biomarker testing
At the center of personalized medicine
Introduction
A move away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the treatment and care of patients with a particular condition, to one which uses new approaches to better manage patients’ health and target therapies to achieve the best outcomes in the management of a patient’s disease or predisposition to disease.
Biomarker testing is at the center of personalized medicine, that is ‘providing the right treatment to the right patient, at the right dose at the right time’. Biomarkers are valuable for predicting prognosis and dose selection.
While oncology has been a primary focus for a great array of different biomarker tests; allergy, cardiology, infectious diseases and inflammatory diseases are among other applications where biomarker testing is currently used.
Multiplex Biomarker Assays
sciDROP PICO technology enables multiplex assays through the deposition of ultra-low volumes of multiple biomarkers onto any given substrate. This is of particular interest when one wants to look at a panel of biomarkers correlating to a disease such as cardiovascular or inflammatory disease.
Intuitive Bioscience has developed a robust platform for biomarker testing with the help of SCIENION technology.
Intuitive Biosciences specialises on custom assay development and contract manufacturing. Among one of their tests, Biosciences provides tuberculosis and specific pathogen-free tests for non-human primate (NHP) research operations. Their tests improve accuracy, while making testing more efficient for colony managers and more humane for the animals.
“Protein multiplexing is our speciality, we utilise SCIENION printers to print our assays, spotting very small amount of liquid on surface is one of the things SCIENION does. But SCIENION is also very valuable to us on creating an ecosystem in the multiplexing world. Their technology particularly is very useful for spotting on irregular surfaces, so it doesn´t need to be on flat surfaces, it can be on different types or shapes.”
Shawn Guse, CEO Intuitive Biosciences
MagArray, a company led by a team from Stanford University, has been using SCIENION sciFLEXARRAYERs to develop a simple, ultra-sensitive, multiplex immunoassay system.
The system consists of a chip that uses magnetic nanotechnology to detect cancer proteins in blood or other fluids with unprecedented sensitivity. The system overcomes limitations of other common clinical analysis technologies to deliver significant advantages to both laboratories and clinical assay designers.