Exonhit receives EU grant of €418,000
Brings novel biomarker tests to Responsify project focused on personalised medicine in cancer
French biotech Exonhit, a developer of small molecule therapeutics and diagnostic products for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, has received a €418,000 grant from the EU through its participation in the Responsify consortium.
Responsify is a European group of 12 partners focusing on personalised medicine in oncology. It aims to identify predictive biomarkers of response to two common chemotherapeutic treatments for breast cancer, anti-HER2 (Herceptin) and anti-angiogenic (Avastin). The goal is to develop CE marked IVD tests.
The consortium will receive a total of approximately €6m, of which €4.8m will be received at inception of the programme.
Exonhit brings its proprietary Genome Wide SpliceArray (GWSA) platform to the project, which will be used to analyse patient transcriptomic profiles and to develop and register diagnostic tests.
The GWSA platform is a patented microarray design that incorporates a specific probe configuration, enabling monitoring of RNA splice variants in humans, mice and rats. These arrays cover whole genomes and monitor known and predicted alternative RNA splicing events.
‘Exonhit’s involvement in this consortium is evidence of the quality of its technology and know-how to identify novel biomarkers. Our collaboration with Institut Gustave Roussy regarding the Dx14 test was key,’ said Loïc Maurel, president of Exonhit’s management board.
‘This grant, which covers more than 70% of our costs in this project, enables us to add predictive tests in a key indication to our existing development portfolio.’
Dx14 is a novel breast cancer diagnostic biomarker developed using Exonhit’s GWSA technology and was licensed from Institut Gustav Roussy in 2009.
