SwastiChemEx: Horizon Discovery and LGC get £360,224

Saturday, 21 June 2014

Horizon Discovery and LGC get £360,224

Horizon Discovery Group plc, the international life science supplying research tools to organisations engaged in genomics research and the development of personalised medicines, together with LGC, an international life sciences measurement and testing company have been offered a research grant of £360,224 ($608,000 USD) by the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, of which Horizon will receive more than half of the funding. The grant is awarded under the Technology Strategy Board’s Collaborative Research and Development (CR&D) project ‘Improving Cell and Tissue Analysis for Stratified Medicine’ and will fund a joint project run by the Company’s Horizon Diagnostics division in partnership with LGC.

The project will fund the research and development of a portfolio of novel reference standard materials in order to serve a high need area of clinical diagnostics.  The programme will establish methods and cross platform data sets to standardise existing ‘liquid biopsy’ genetic diagnostic tests, to determine test sensitivity, and to help drive the development of new more sensitive systems as well as training and proficiency testing schemes for pathology laboratories.

Minimally invasive ‘liquid biopsies’ of tumour cells and tumour DNA from the bloodstream can enable earlier primary and secondary diagnosis compared to solid tumour biopsies, as well as detection of metastasis and/or residual disease, and ‘real time’ monitoring of treatment effectiveness that isn’t possible with solid biopsy methods. Standardisation within and between facilities and across geographies will enable the uptake of minimally invasive cancer diagnostics as a routine clinical procedure

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