Bergen Teknologioverføring

The Invention

BTO is actively seeking a company interested in commercialising a new diagnostic and prognostic tool for estimating an individual patient’s risk of cancer survival and recurrence. Our invention will make the decision easier for medical practitioners to provide patients suffering from cancer with a more appropriated treatment. By a single genetic test that is highly predictable we can enable earlier disease determination so that the best treatment can be administered at an earlier stage. The tests enable the clinicians to distinguish patients most likely to recur without therapy from patients with a better prognosis (where avoidance of the therapy is important due to severe associated risks). In addition, predictive factors may identify the appropriate therapy for an individual patient

Application

- Ready to be used and implemented as a supplement to the standard traditional diagnostic tests
– A diagnostic tool for distinguishing benign tissue from malignant tumours
– A prognostic tool to evaluate the mortality of a cancer or a recurrence of cancer, at an early stage
– Our findings have been made mainly regarding leukaemia and breast cancer but with possible applications in several areas; colon, prostate, melanoma, thyroid, lung, and cervical. Defining these areas of application will require further research

Advantages

- Enables the decision of correct treatment for patients quickly and at an early stage
– Reduces the possibility of fatal wrong treatment by avoiding intensive chemotherapy
– Highly sensitive and reliable (the marker is detected in all tumour samples investigated)
– Fast, user-friendly, reproducible, and low cost

Technology

Identification of genes specifically deregulated in cancer cells could bring to light new oncogenes or tumour suppressors with clinical relevance in cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutics. We have recently developed a fast and precise test to specifically and reliably detect the expression of a novel gene in tumours (firmly based on RT-qPCR) and demonstrated its capacity to predict overall patient survival at an early stage of the disease. Indeed, this gene is not only deregulated in malignant tissues compared to their normal tissues of origin but, importantly, high levels of this gene expression correlate to a poor overall survival in breast cancer and certain leukaemia subtypes. Our prognostic test is firmly based on a specific and quantitative detection method of this novel gene at the mRNA level.

Interested in this technology?
For more information about this technology, contact our buisniss development manager Bjørn Alsterberg here.