Mar 16, 2021 | staff reporter
NEW YORK — BioMark Diagnostics said on Tuesday that its collaborators at the University of Alberta’s Metabolomics Innovation Centre have been awarded a C$150,000 (US$120,327) grant to evaluate the company’s metabolite biomarker panel for early lung cancer detection.
The funding is being provided through a cancer technology grant program sponsored by the Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research — Institute of Cancer Research, and the Brain Canada Foundation.
According to BioMark, the Metabolomics Innovation Centre will use the grant to validate the biomarker panel in over 1,200 patients. At the end of the award period, the Vancouver-based company said it expects have a laboratory-developed test that can be used on commonly used mass spectrometry platforms and a plan to launch the test, first through an accredited lab in Quebec and later Canada-wide.
Since BioMark and the Metabolomics Innovation Centre began working together in early 2015, “we have worked hard to establish metabolite biomarkers that are specific to lung cancer in plasma samples and now we begin the final stretch in validating our test toward commercialization across Canada,” BioMark President and CEO Rashid Ahmed Bux said in a statement.
