Alliance to Develop Cancer Diagnostics

Clarient, Inc. (Aliso Viejo, CA, USA), a technology and services resource for pathologists, oncologists, and the pharmaceutical industry, and Natural Selection, Inc. (NSI; La Jolla, CA, USA), a developer of computational intelligence methods, have announced a three-year agreement for in vitro diagnostics development in oncology.

The two companies are partnering to develop innovative diagnostics to improve cancer detection. The agreement grants Clarient an exclusive, worldwide, non-transferable license to apply the NSI algorithms to specific diagnostic analysis and services.

Clarient's medical experience enables it to bridge the gap between large, cumbersome data and a usable panel of cancer tests. The services will be offered to biotechnology companies and academic medical centers as a tool for the development and commercialization of novel cancer markers for diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy selection.

Ron Andrews, Clarient's president and CEO, commented, "The advent of personalized medicine and the resulting gap between therapeutics and diagnostics has fueled a ‘land grab' in the area of cancer biomarkers that will potentially increase the market for cancer diagnostics by as much as U.S.$1 billion in the coming three-to-five years. Partnering with NSI provides Clarient with proprietary access to an important intellectual asset. This key tool will aid in the development of clinically relevant biomarkers either in-house or through collaborations with biotech firms as well as academic medical centers. We expect the resulting novel markers to produce incremental recurring revenues generated by Clarient directly through its laboratory services group as well as through licensing agreements with third parties.”

NSI was founded in 1993 by Dr. Lawrence J. Fogel, a pioneer of evolutionary computation. The company specializes in applying this technology to solve problems in medicine and biochemistry, such as image analysis, pharmaceutical design, structure prediction, and sequence analysis, as well as other personalized medical applications. NSI also supports a variety of defense and other industry applications.

Clarient combines innovative technologies with its expertise to assess and characterize cancer. The company's mission is to provide technologies, services, and critical information to improve the quality and reduce the cost of patient care as well as accelerating the drug-development process. The company's principal customers include pathologists, oncologists, hospitals, and biopharmaceutical companies.



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Clarient
Natural Selection