OXFORD, England & MANCHESTER, England & ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cytox, a precision medicine testing company commercializing polygenic risk scoring (PRS) and other approaches for assessing genetic risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, has collaborated with integrated genomics and genetics leader AKESOgen to verify the performance of the Cytox genoBAR™ test with saliva samples.
The genoBAR research test is intended to help pharma, biotech and sponsors of large cohort studies reduce the time and high cost associated with identifying and stratifying subjects for clinical trials and large population research, which can take more than six months and run to tens of thousands of dollars per participant. The work performed by Cytox and AKESOgen resulted in over 99% concordance between the SNPs used in the PRS identified from blood and saliva samples collected from the same subjects and run on the Cytox variaTECT™ microarray on the Applied Biosystems™ GeneTitan™ Multi-Channel (MC) instrument platform from Thermo Fisher Scientific. The saliva samples were collected using the DNA Genotek DNA saliva kit. The results of this verification study will provide an additional means to collect DNA from prospective clinical trial and cohort subjects and opens the possibility of screening even larger population groups for disease risk.
“The extension of our test to include saliva samples in addition to blood samples and biobanked DNA represents a significant step forward,” commented Dr Richard Pither, CEO of Cytox, “Our customers in pharma and biotech now have the ability to collect larger numbers of samples in a highly efficient and non-invasive way, opening the doors to the cost-effective screening of tens to hundreds of thousands of prospective clinical study participants, or still larger population networks associated with regional healthcare centres or national dementia programmes.”
Dr Mark Bouzyk, Chief Scientific Officer at AKESOgen, added, “The collaboration between AKESOgen and Cytox aims to ensure the highest accuracy possible across all the biological samples types generally used for genetic analysis. We believe these results and our partnership with Cytox will eventually result in more effective screening and diagnosis for those patients impacted by Alzheimer’s disease."
