The hospitals will begin collecting blood samples from consenting patients in disease areas that coincide with ChondroGene’s primary areas of interest – cancer, cardiovascular disease, central nervous system disorders and arthritis. The information from these samples will provide additional data useful in identifying blood-based biomarkers for specific diseases.
The data will also be added to ChondroGene’s growing database of gene expression profiles, which currently contains profiles from several thousand people possessing a wide range of disease conditions, as well as from disease-free subjects. The hospitals have also agreed to offer ChondroGene’s molecular tests to their patients as these tests become available.
“We are pleased to be working with these two key hospitals in the region,” stated K Wayne Marshall, president and CEO of ChondroGene. “We expect to enter into similar relationships with other organizations around the world in the future in order to further expand the genetic diversity of our gene expression database as we move towards developing commercial products.”