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news.The Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) Foundation and Rules-Based Medicine (RBM) have reached the first milestone in a program to develop a panel of plasma protein biomarkers for SMA using RBM's Multi-Analyte Profiling (MAP) technology platform.
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In the collaboration, RBM will discover and also confirm plasma protein biomarker candidates identified from the multicenter Biomarkers for SMA (BforSMA) clinical study sponsored by the SMA Foundation and conducted by BG Medicine.
The identification of such biomarkers may help to assess drug efficacy and shorten the duration of clinical trials of (Spinal Muscular Atrophy) SMA therapies.
The SMA Foundation and RBM are continuing to analyze the results and plan to create a specific panel of biomarker assays for use in clinical trials exploring new treatments for SMA.
SMA Foundation chief scientific officer Karen Chen said Biomarkers are critical to accelerate therapeutic development for any disease and they are even more important for rare diseases like SMA where patient populations are small and mostly consist of children.
"We are excited to work with RBM to leverage their MAP technology to develop a biomarker panel for SMA that will help evaluate responses to treatments more efficiently and minimize the burden of clinical trials for patients and families," Chen said.