PGT Awarded NHS Grant to Fund Pharmacogenetic Study on Patient Response to Breast Cancer Chemotherapy
March 10, 2010
Population Genetics technologies (PGT) Ltd, a privately owned company based in Cambridge, UK today announced that it has been awarded a grant from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) as part of the Institute’s Invention for Innovation (i4i) Programme.
The i4i Programme provides investment in, and improved identification of, promising healthcare technologies in order to accelerate the development of new healthcare products for the 21st century. The i4i programme funds translational research, extending between basic research and pre-clinical trials, or health technology assessments.
PGT has developed proprietary technologies that will both dramatically reduce the costs of performing large-scale population studies on Next Generation Sequencing platforms and also allow the detection and characterization of rare allelic variations in disease phenotypes. The company believes that these technologies will have a significant impact on discovery, biomarker identification, diagnostic and personalized medicine workflows.
The NIHR funded study will use PGT’s technologies to assess the link between rare sequence variants in 1000 patient genomes and response to a range of chemotherapeutic agents.
Commenting on the award Mel Kronick, President and CEO of PGT said, ”We are extremely pleased to have been awarded this grant which recognizes the potential of our technologies to have a major clinical impact over the coming years. PGT intends to use this study to demonstrate the value of its approach in identifying, before treatment, which patients in any given population are likely to respond favourably or adversely to a given drug regime. PGT’s technologies also have potential applications in determining, with high confidence, predisposition to many disease states.”
Contact
Dr Mel Kronick
President and Chief Executive Officer
Population Genetics technologies Ltd
Babraham Research Campus
Cambridgeshire
UK, CB22 3AT
Phone: 01223 497 350
Mobile: 07795 564 905
Email: mel.kronick@popgentech.com