Biocortech and the FondaMental foundation : strategic alliance

April 5th 2011 - Paris, France and Créteil, France - Biocortech, the biotech company dedicated to the development of biological diagnostics for personalized psychiatry, and FondaMental, the foundation of scientific cooperation for mental health research and care, announce the signing of a strategic alliance to validate biomarkers for personalized psychiatry.

This strategic alliance aims at speeding up the availability of qualified blood tests for diagnosis, prognosis, drug selection and monitoring for a personalized medical management of patients suffering from mental health disorders. Concretely, Biocortech and FondaMental will collaborate in clinically validating blood tests measuring biomarkers identified by Biocortech or in FondaMental's network of scientific excellence. Biocortech and FondaMental will define relevant clinical settings and clinical issues to be addressed, build up adequate resources to access blood samples of patients with proper medical records, set up and monitor clinical trials. Biocortech will have responsibility for industrializing and commercializing qualified tests... Biocortech 's Press Release -

MEDIAN Technologies : new contract in the field of lung cancer with a top-five pharma company

05/11/11 - Sophia-Antipolis, France - MEDIAN Technologies, the leading provider of clinical applications for quantitative management of treatment responses in oncology imaging, announced that it had signed a new contract with a top-five pharma company, following on from an initial contract in 2010.
The new contract covers a pilot study performed as part of a lung cancer trial. This study will investigate the use of an advanced imaging biomarker to evaluate the treatment response (tumor volume, in this case).
"This new collaboration will enable us to study the value of tumor volume as a treatment response criterion. There are several possible advantages. Firstly, the use of tumor volume could decrease variability during image interpretation. Secondly, the change over time in tumor volume may be better correlated with the patients' survival rate. Thirdly and lastly, tumor volume may show up an earlier treatment response", emphasized MEDIAN's Chairman and CEO Fredrik Brag. "Innovations in image interpretation are playing an ever more significant role in the cancer drug development process. The signature of this new contract confirms the validity of our approach", he added.
A number of cancer centers of excellence in the USA, EMEA and Australasia are involved in the study... MEDIAN Technologies' Press Release - communiqué de presse MEDIAN Technologies -

ERYtech Pharma : positive results in Immunomodulation thanks to red cell targeting

March 21th, 2011 - ERYtech Pharma reports that their positive results obtained with the project on Immunomodulation will be presented at the 6th International Symposium on the Clinical Use of Cellular Products, Erlangen (March 24-25, 2011).
Immunomodulation is a promising therapeutic strategy dedicated to all conditions resulting from a dysfunction of the adaptive immune system. In such pathological conditions, the immune system either fails to react, or conversely, overreacts in the presence of antigens, leading to the development of an infection or a tumor. At the basis of immune reaction, dendritic cells and macrophages are the key antigen-presenting cells involved in the process initiation. One of the great challenges of Immunomodulation specifically lies in the selective targeting of these dendritic cells and macrophages to modulate the immune response. Making the cell targeting more selective indeed amounts to significantly optimize the therapeutic efficacy of a product...

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...About ERYtech Pharma

ERYtech Pharma (Lyon, Philadelphia) is a specialty pharma company developing innovative therapeutic solutions based on its proprietary technology and expertise in the physiological properties of erythrocytes. The company addresses serious pathologies, orphan indications or unaddressed sub-populations of patients, particularly in the fields of hematology, cancer and metabolic diseases... ERYtech Pharma's Press Release -