CAMBRIDGE, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PredictImmune, developers of pioneering prognostic tools for guiding treatment options and improving patient outcomes in immune-mediated diseases, today confirmed its latest patent grant in the US. The US patent is part of PredictImmune’s third family of intellectual property (IP) relating to methods for predicting autoimmune disease risk. This follows successful grants across the company’s first family of IP in the UK and Europe in October 2018 and Canada in January this year.
The focus of the US patent is on the biological mechanism of the test, which demonstrates whether a patient does or does not exhibit T-cell exhaustion. An ‘exhausted’ patients’ immune system isn’t able to respond effectively to infection, leaving them struggling to clear infections. However, the implication for patients with auto-immune disease is more positive – their exhausted CD8 cells are also less effective at mounting an auto-immune response, resulting in a milder form of such diseases.
PredictImmune’s entire portfolio of patents and other IP support its goal of enabling personalised medicine for a range of immune-mediated diseases. Licensed from Cambridge Enterprise, the US patent provides evidence to support the expansion of the PredictImmune product line beyond its first test for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), into other related diseases and in turn, improve patient outcomes across a broader range of patients in the US as well as Europe.
Immune mediated diseases, such as IBD, are chronic and incurable with clinical courses that vary among individuals with the same disease. To date, these diseases have been treated with a ‘one size fits all’ approach, despite there being significant variation in disease course between patients with the same disease. This approach means that patients with a relatively mild form of the disease tend to be over treated, resulting in significant side effects, whilst those with a more aggressive form of the disease, can be under-medicated, resulting in frequent relapses or flare-ups, which result in long term damage and significant morbidity and mortality. PredictImmune’s tests, give clinicians the ability to determine how aggressive a patients’ disease is at the point of diagnosis, enabling them to make informed decisions about the treatment course most relevant for each individual patient.
Paul Kinnon, CEO, PredictImmune commented: “We are excited by the issuance of our US patent as it provides further support of the novelty and innovation underpinning the development of our prognostic tests in these devastating and chronic diseases and further enables our US commercial strategy. It allows us to build on the ground-breaking research carried out over the last 15 years by Prof Ken Smiths’ laboratory at the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, and focus on developing ground-breaking products that will help deliver the benefits of a more personalised approach to treatment for patients with these debilitating and life-threatening diseases.”
The US patent grant comes at a pertinent time for PredictImmune - PredictSURE IBD™, the company’s first product addressing IBD (both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis) launches in the UK imminently and in the US later this year.
For information: www.predictimmune.com
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