bioMerieux and Exonhit Therapeutics Initiate Their Third Diagnostic Program

bioMérieux and ExonHit Therapeutics announced the initiation of their third programme for the screening of cancer from blood. One of the goals is to assist physicians in deciding whether to proceed with surgery for prostate cancer.

Such diagnostic tests constitute a real innovation in the field of cancer, since they should allow the detection of cancers from a blood sample. Very early treatment is critical to increase the successful outcome of any anti-cancer treatment.

This collaboration is based on the expertise and intellectual property of ExonHit in the analysis of genome expression, and on the know-how of bioMérieux in the field of in vitro diagnostics. Its purpose is to create DNA biochips which will allow screening for the presence of cancer markers from blood samples.

Indeed, DNA biochips are perfectly adapted tools to detect several dozens of nucleic acid markers, which in turn enable the characterisation of multigenic pathologies such as cancers.

bioMérieux and ExonHit first launched a programme for breast cancer screening from blood, for which a prospective study is ongoing, then a programme for the detection of colorectal cancers, which are considered to be the most common, regardless of sex, and they are now going to tackle prostate cancer, which is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in men today.

“We are very happy to tackle such public health challenges with bioMérieux” said Bruno Tocque, Chairman of ExonHit.

“We are confident we will rapidly provide bioMérieux with a new diagnostic panel in the market of molecular detection of cancers.”