Ariana Pharma, a leader in decision support tools and services to accelerate the development and optimal use of drugs and biomarker discovery, announces today that it has entered into a partnership to improve the diagnosis and prognosis of chronic hepatitis.
Ariana is collaborating with AP-HP (Beaujon Hospital) and INSERM joined centre of excellence for viral hepatitis and Bio-Rad France to apply its novel technology to the discovery of new biomarkers. The Hepachronix project pools their collective expertise to identify, develop and market new tools for the early diagnosis of fibrosis and for the prognosis of resistance to treatment. Diagnostics specialist Bio-Rad leads this three-year-project.
This project aims to deepen understanding of the processes by which liver fibrosis (in HCV patients) evolves from an early, mild stage to serious liver diseases such as cirrhosis and hepatoma carcinoma. Detecting patients at the early stages of fibrosis is critical to treat them as early as possible. However, a rough 40 per cent of HCV infected patients do not respond to standard antiviral treatment. Hence the Hepachronix project aims to develop additional biomarkers to characterize patients responder status, and to adapt the therapy.
“Ariana Pharma is looking forward to applying its expertise and KEM(R) technology to the diagnosis and prognosis of hepatitis which chronically affects many hundred million patients worldwide.” said Mohammad Afshar, CEO of Ariana Pharma. “The identification and validation of new sets of biomarkers have the potential to improve diagnosis and treatment of these major public health problems.”
Ariana Pharma and its partners have received funding from the French FUI and from the Ile de France region and will share the royalties from sales of the envisioned in vitro diagnostic reagents that will be marketed by Bio-Rad Laboratories. The announcement reflects Ariana Pharma’s leading position in identifying biomarkers and demonstrates the strength of its KEM (Knowledge Extraction and Management) platform for disease diagnosis.
Taking part in the Hepacronix project also further demonstrates Ariana's commitment to the field of biomarker identification and validation. This follows the recent announcement of the adoption of its KEM technology by the FDA.
KEM will be used to complement traditional statistical tools to identify signature probes and has the ability to combine genomic and proteomic data with patient characteristics to maximize the probability of an effective test. The KEM system is able to generate, assess and prioritize hypotheses, handle missing data and optimize multiple objectives enhancing conventional methods of analysis.
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