Rules-Based Medicine, Inc. Launches DiscoveryMAP™ Service for Drug and Diagnostic Development
Austin, Texas, June 17, 2009 — Rules-Based Medicine, Incorporated (RBM), the world's leading multiplexed biomarker testing laboratory, today announced the availability of the most comprehensive collection of quantitative immunoassays for use in advancing safety, efficacy and efficiency in drug and diagnostic development. The new service, DiscoveryMAP™ v 1.0, offers customers dynamic coverage of most physiologically relevant pathways, providing biological information and leads for further study. This unique and comprehensive offering increases the odds of identifying new protein biomarker patterns in almost any drug development or diagnostic discovery project.
"Despite the known benefits of biomarkers in drug development, many biomarker discovery efforts fail to contribute because the patterns do not reproduce on a clinically validated platform. The RBM approach is to discover new biomarker patterns on the same platform that will be used in clinical trials," said Craig Benson, RBM chief executive officer. "DiscoveryMAP™ was designed in collaboration with our pharmaceutical and biotech customers and includes biomarkers known to be important in the major disease indications for drug development. Once a pattern is discovered, we can seamlessly convert those biomarkers into a new custom panel for high-throughput sample processing."
DiscoveryMAP™ v 1.0 utilizes RBM’s proprietary multi-analyte profiling (MAP) platform to quantify key blood-based biomarkers representing dozens of important biological pathways.
DiscoveryMAP™ provides customers with the most robust, quantitative data compared to any available proteomic service or platform technology. All samples are processed in RBM’s CLIA-certified lab using proprietary reagents and software to give the most accurate and reproducible protein measurements. Multiplexing allows all of these assays to be processed from a 500 microliter sample of serum or plasma, compared with single-plex platforms, such as ELISA, which would require upwards of 10 to 15 milliliters of sample. DiscoveryMAP™ samples are processed on an industrialized, automated platform that enables the discovery of biomarker patterns made up of multiple proteins, many with small, yet reproducibly detected, changes. New patterns can then be converted to a custom focused biomarker panel for high-throughput processing in clinical trials as a service from RBM or supplied to the customer as an optimized kit manufactured under Good Manufacturing Practice regulations.
DiscoveryMAP™ has already been successfully used in the discovery of new diagnostic biomarker panels. RBM’s partnerships with Psynova Neurotech, Satoris, Inc., and leading academic researchers have yielded diagnostic biomarker patterns that have been validated with multi-site sample collections for applications such as neuropsychiatry, neurodegenerative disease, nephrology, immunology and cardiology. RBM is also partnering with several pharmaceutical companies to develop companion diagnostic products. The Company is seeking additional collaborations to develop diagnostic and companion diagnostic applications based on patterns detected with DiscoveryMAP™.
Drug developers have increasingly turned to the use of biomarkers in order to increase efficiency and reduce cost and risk. Researchers require sensitive and quantitative data to pinpoint the biomarker patterns that are either directly involved in the disease process or are useful surrogate markers. When those patterns can be reliably measured, the efficiency of drug development is accelerated while achieving greater efficacy and safety. By quantifying nearly 200 important blood proteins, DiscoveryMAP™ represents an important tool for biomarker discovery.