Precision Diagnostics - academia, biotech, pharma - collaboration is key

Precision Diagnostics is a pre-requisite for Precision Medicine by enabling a characterization of diseases on a molecular level and stratification of patients leading to mechanism-based treatment. Collaborative approaches in identifying, verifying and validating are required to enable a faster pace for the development of innovative new biomarker signatures.

In order to quickly development these markers, collaboration between academia, biotech and pharma companies is of high importance. Sciomics holds a unique position as we work with all parties involved, bridge gaps, speed up sample procurement, connect researchers and provide fast and highly sensitive analyses using our in-house scioDiscover platform to identify and verify new biomarkers. Sciomics spans the whole development pipeline for biomarkers and drives this forward in the research setting as well as for its own commercial biomarker development projects.

To find the ideal biomarker for each disease, new biomarker candidates can be derived from all kinds of biological samples such as plasma/serum, spinal fluid (CSF), cells such as PBMCs, buffy coats or single immune cell populations. Selecting the ideal sample type can yield significant advantages, e.g. not having to rely on CSF but instead use markers measured in plasma or serum samples as these are far easier to obtain and the procedure for getting plasma is far less invasive and less costly compared to CSF.

Next to classical diagnostic biomarkers, biomarkers can also be used to predict disease trajectories e.g. whether hospitalization is required, disease severity1 or treatment response in various disease areas such as infectious or neurodegenerative diseases and organ damage while also yielding information about the disease mechanisms.

Leveraging the biomarker development pipeline used at Sciomics in collaboration with academic groups, biotech and pharma partners can yield ideal biomarker candidates in a much faster fashion to further Precision Diagnostics for Precision Medicine.