Qlucore Receives European Funding That will Benefit Personalized Medicine
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Qlucore has been awarded funding of €0.6 million over a three year period by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme as part of a €6.0 million consortium project (Grant n° 601851) for the development of mathematical and statistical algorithms focusing on integrating data from multiple analytical platforms focusing on integrating genetic and proteomic data with clinical variables.
On receiving the award, Carl-Johan Ivarsson, CEO, Qlucore said, "Personalized medicine, and in particular Hepatitis C patients, will benefit from the project outcome. One of the primary objectives of the consortium is to provide predictive tests that will lead to improvements in the health of these patients, which will simultaneously reduce the costs of medical treatment."
The consortium, known as the PoC-HCV consortium, aims to develop integrated genetic and protein biomarker tests for use in treating and monitoring HCV patients, as well as in clinical research.
Data and algorithms will be tailored for analysis and treatment in a Point of Care environment for Hepatitis C. One of the outputs from the consortium will be a mobile application prototype where the algorithms are implemented.
Establishing a path for validation and implementation of point-of-care medical devices is a challenge, and the driving vision of the Consortium.
The consortium additionally consists of the coordinator Inserm (Institut Pasteur) (France), Inserm Transfert (France), Epistem (UK) and Biosurfit (Portugal).
With the primary objective to provide Point of Care diagnostic and predictive tests and reduce costs, the approach will capitalize on the consortium's combined expertise spanning leading edge miniaturized molecular testing, lab-on-a-chip systems and algorithm design.
These enabling technologies will permit the development and delivery of the first integrated genetic and protein biomarker tests, applied here to Hepatitis C disease for: (i) making the decision to treat; (ii) selection of therapy; (iii) response-guided monitoring; and (iv) clinical research practices.
Hepatatis-C is a global public health problem with over 150 million people infected worldwide, representing a 15 billion Euro/year market. It is particularly prevalent in under-developed countries and treatments can be very costly.
One vision is to allow the physicians to make better treatment decisions (selecting the correct drug) and hence lower the total cost of treatment. In countries with many infected patients and limited healthcare budget this will provide an enormous improvement in quality of life for this patient group.
The algorithms developed by Qlucore will be based on classification techniques. They will also be available in future versions of Qlucore Omics Explorer and hence enable researchers and physicians in other areas to benefit from the results.
Qlucore has recruited and increased its engineering capacity in order to fulfil its role in the PoC HCV consortium. This, combined with the recently announced grant to Qlucore from VINNOVA (Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems) is additional validation of the high value being placed on developments currently being undertaken by Qlucore.
