Companies Merge to Form Diagnostics Firm

A new medical diagnostics firm, Prognostics Ltd. (Cambridge, UK.), has been formed by the merger of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, UK) companies SmartBead Technologies Ltd. and FingerPrint Diagnostics Ltd.

Prognostics will be based on the Babraham Bioscience Research Campus (Cambridge, UK), and will work with Papworth Hospital (also in Cambridge), a cardiothoracic hospital, to perform clinical trials of its profiling diagnostics.

The merged company will develop and sell the range of multiplexed diagnostics developed by SmartBead, which initially focused on the area of autoimmune diseases, and will accelerate the development of FingerPrint's CADprint product for the diagnosis of heart disease from a simple blood sample, with a product launch expected in 2008.

SmartBead uses scaleable, low-cost, robust, multiplexing technologies. It has taken well-established microelectronics technologies and combined them with existing bioassay technologies to provide scientists and physicians with the tagging and tracking benefits of barcodes at a microscopic level. The technology barcodes molecules and has the capacity to multiplex two million individual tests simultaneously in the same vessel. This is easier and cheaper than chip-based array technologies and substantially reduces the time spent on diagnosis in hospital laboratories.

FingerPrint Diagnostics was formed as a wholly owned subsidiary of Cambridge-based technology consultants TCP Innovations Ltd. (Cambridge, UK). In collaboration with the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London (London, UK) and Metabometrix Ltd (London, UK), the company was the first to show that a profiling diagnostic using a simple blood sample could be useful for the diagnosis of heart disease. Since then, in collaboration with the Papworth Hospital, the company has focused on commercializing CADprint, its cardiovascular profiling product.

SmartBead's CEO Robert Booth, who will be the head of Prognostics, said: "We have worked successfully with FingerPrint for over two years now but this merging of interests will broaden and accelerate the availability of a new and revolutionary class of medical diagnostics, ‘prognostics'. Together, we will deliver an entirely new type of diagnostic which will provide a rapid and simple non-invasive diagnosis of diseases such as heart disease, Alzheimer's, and cancer, enabling improved patient care and outcomes.”



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Babraham Bioscience Research Campus
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