StemDiagnostics
Cenamps has helped to establish a €3.5 million research and development programme to improve the success rate of stem cell transplants, including bone marrow transplants for Leukaemia patients. The StemDiagnostics consortium will aim to identify new bio-markers, indicators of transplant rejection and clinical complications, and develop medical diagnostic tests and nano/micro biosensors that will help medical practitioners to improve the success rate of allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplants (HSCT). A treatment for life threatening conditions leukaemia, lymphoma and inherited immune disorders. Cenamps is leading on the exploitation and dissemination activities on the project.
Professor Anne Dickinson, Haematological Sciences, Newcastle University, leads the programme in partnership with a consortium of 13 leading European clinical research institutes and biotech firms. Around 7,000 such transplants take place throughout Europe each year, but the survival rate is low (40 – 60 per cent) and decreases rapidly with patient age. The application of HSCT therapy is also hampered by the lack of suitable matched donors: only 25 –30 per cent of patients find a compatible sibling donor.
Such transplants involve the use of bone marrow, peripheral blood stem cells and umbilical cord blood as stem cell sources. The project, which follows 3 year’s research by Professor Dickinson and the Consortium, aims to develop tests with the use of the latest BioNano and lab-on-a-chip techniques provided by SMEs such as Orla Protein Technologies, also based in North East England. Cenamps, a Newcastle-based centre for emerging technologies, will handle commercialisation aspects of the project’s outcomes.
Professor Anne Dickinson, commented: “The project is the first of its kind to bring together research looking at a variety of different biomarkers – or indicators of post transplant complications. These include DNA and proteins. From this work, we hope to be able to develop new diagnostic tools using genomics, proteomics, in vitro bioassays and biochips, to aid in earlier clinical intervention by predicting any complications which may arise in our bone marrow transplant patients.”
StemDiagnostics will develop new proteomic, biological and genomic tests for predicting patient response prior to transplant and subsequently for monitoring of patient response to novel therapeutics for the most severe complication of HSCT – graft versus host disease (GvHD). The consortium aims to bring to the clinic the next generation of nano/micro diagnostics technologies to improve HSCT and patient outcomes.