interesting article, page-5

auction manaVermillion Buys Correlogic's Assets for $435K
Posted on November 11, 2011 by xb-8




The deal comes as Correlogic has reached an agreement to settle its dispute with Quest Diagnostics and Laboratory Corporation of America regarding rights to its ovarian cancer program,

PCR Insider

auction manaVermillion Buys Correlogic's Assets for $435K,ByAdam Bonislawski

The firms R&D costs increased 27 percent to $1,4 million from $1,1 million a year ago, while SG&A costs rose 21 percent to $3,5 million from $2,9 million, The total increase in operating expenses, Vermillion said, was due to higher clinical trial and collaboration costs related to its ovarian cancer program and its Vasclir test for peripheral artery disease,

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The purchase, said Vermillion CEO Gail Page, gives the company access to prospectively collected samples, intellectual property, and software, all of which could accelerate our ovarian program, including its second-generation ovarian cancer diagnostic OVA2, The deal also potentially provides further IP protection, she noted,

Vermillion announced the acquisition during an earnings call reviewing its third-quarter 2011 results, For the quarter, the company posted revenues of $320,000, down 23 percent from $413,000 a year ago,

Is Healthlinx Eyeing Purchase of Correlogic&039;s Assets as Part of Move into US Cancer Dx Market?

Even when an experiment does not go as planned,researchers can learn a lot about the experimental process, Nathan Pankrantz and his colleagues identified two CNVs that they thought might be linked to Parkinsons disease, Upon further study, however, the researchers found that they were articts, likely due to characteristics of both the study samples and the calling algorithms used,

This effort could run into IP issues, however, A valuation of Healthlinx done in June by Australian consulting firm Acuity Technology Management noted that Correlogics OvaCheck panel includes three of the five proteins comprising the OvPlex panel, Given that Correlogics OvaCheck patent was filed prior to Healthlinxs OvPlex patent, there remains a risk that not all claims [related to OvPlex] will be granted in all jurisdictions, the Acuity report said,

The acquisition also includes Correlogics assets related to other disease indications, including breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer,

Theres always a lot of white noise out there by companies claiming to be in this space, she said, By taking this IP and software, we can harvest it, and we can also sort of keep other people out of that space, if you will,

Page said that the company plans to keep its comments regarding the ROMA test to a minimum at this point, noting that there has not been a whole lot of marketing around the product,

Vasclir is the second test Quest Diagnostics accepted from the company as part of the partners three-test strategic alliance agreement, and is currently one of its primary research focuses, According to Page, Vermillion plans to schedule a meeting with the US Food & Drug Administration to discuss results of an intended use study for the test that it completed earlier this year and to present these results at a major cardiovascular meeting during the first half of 2012,

The University of Heidelbergs Michael Eichenlaub and Laurence Ettwiller discuss the de novo generation of enhancers in vertebrates, Taking advantage of the massive gene loss following the last whole genome duplication in teleosts to systematically identify regions that have lost their coding capacity but retain sequence conservation with mammals, Eichenlaub and Ettwiller found that these regions show enhancer activity while the orthologous coding regions have no regulatory activity, suggesting to them that enhancers are an important playground for creating new regulatory variability and evolutionary innovation, they write,

A team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Yale University has demonstrated the feasibility of routinelygenotyping lung cancer samples for alterations in more than a dozen suspicious genes in a clinical setting, They used a multiplex PCR-based method called SNaPshot to assess hundreds of non-small-cell lung cancer samples as part of a clinical testing regimen,

In October, the US Bankruptcy Court in the District of Maryland ruled in Correlogics vor, allowing it to reject the licensing agreements, over Quest and LabCorps objections (PM 10/08/2011),

The US Senate passed a2012 appropriations bill for several federal departments that would provide a small increase for the Food and Drug Administration but would results in small cuts or flat research funding for others, such as the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Agriculture, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, The bill provides $2,5 billion to FDA, compared with $2,45 billion last year,

In particular, Correlogic said this uncertainty stemmed from the ct that the licensing agreements were signed in 2002 when OvaCheck was still a mass spectrometry-based test, Since then it had migrated to an immunoassay version, which, the company claimed, wasnt covered by the deals with the reference labs,

Oct 31-Nov 4 / Trieste, Italy

Eichenlaub and Ettwiller, PLoS Biology

NanoString Technologies has raised $20 million in a Series D round of financing, Among the new investors in the firm is GE, through its healthymagination Fund, as well as former Genzyme Chairman and CEO Henri Termeer, According to GE, the investment is the first made by its healthymagination Fund that is aligned with GE Healthcares recently announced $1 billion commitment to new oncology R&D,

The Personalized Medicine Coalition has awarded Leroy Hood, president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology, its 2011 Leadership in Personalized Medicine Award, The PMC recognized Hood for his pioneering vision to transform medicine from reactive to predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory (P4 medicine), Hood and his colleagues helped develop the DNA and sequencers that were instrumental in mapping the human genome,

Upon filing for bankruptcy, Correlogic sought to reject OvaCheck licensing agreements it had signedauction management software with Quest and LabCorp, claiming that uncertainty over the validity of the agreements was an impediment to obtaining new investment and was hampering its reorganization efforts (GWDN 07/23/2010),

De Novo Generation of Enhancers in Vertebrates

Nevertheless, one purpose of the Correlogic purchase is deterring future competition, Page noted,

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This story originally ran on Nov, 9 and has been updated to reflect new information from Vermillion,