TORONTO, July 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Axela Biosensors, Inc. today announced that Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC plans to use the dotLab System in a proposed study of childhood neurotrauma. The system will be used as a research tool to screen high-risk infants for unsuspected brain injury in an emergency department (ED) setting. Biomarkers such as neuron-specific enolase (NSE) and myelin basic protein (MBP), which are candidate markers for shaken baby syndrome and other types of neurotrauma, will be studied.
Rachel Berger, MD, MPH, a pediatrician and researcher in the Child Advocacy Center at Children’s and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine said: “Our preliminary data demonstrate that NSE concentrations obtained as part of our previous studies using an ELISA correlate strongly with the NSE concentrations obtained with the dotLab System. This is the only system, to our knowledge in the United States, which has the capability of measuring serum biomarker concentrations in an ED setting.” This ongoing research is part of a grant proposal entitled ‘Novel Approaches to Screening for Inflicted Childhood Neurotrauma.’
“If biomarker measurement becomes part of routine clinical care for infants, it will be important that results be obtained in less than an hour. In addition, the analysis must be performed in a very small amount of blood serum, as it is extremely difficult to obtain adequate volumes of blood from infants. In our validation, the dotLab System was able to deliver results in less time and with a smaller amount of sample than ELISA. Our system also provides automated analysis, while ELISA is more labor intensive and too cumbersome a method to carry out in an ED setting,” said Rocky Ganske, President and CEO of Axela. “We are excited about the dotLab System’s potential to considerably accelerate and positively impact Dr. Berger’s already significant body of research into childhood neurotrama biomarkers.”
Axela has a significant and growing catalog of clinical research biomarker targets that will be deployed for use with multiplex dotLab Sensors in the later part of 2007. Inclusion in this emergency room research study further validates the company’s business model of providing clinician scientists an accessible platform to research novel biomarkers of disease.
About Axela Biosensors, Inc.
Axela Biosensors provides products that accelerate the validation of protein biomarkers from discovery into routine clinical use. Axela’s proprietary breakthrough technology, Diffractive Optics Technology (dot(TM)), enables the real-time detection and quantitation of protein binding events in complex media. This technology has been incorporated into the dotLab(TM) System, a bench-top laboratory platform that delivers simple, affordable, yet highly sensitive protein based assays for clinical protein research. Axela is a privately-held company based in Toronto, Canada whose major investor is VenGrowth Private Equity Partners Inc., one of Canada’s premier private equity managers. For more information, please visit http://www.axela.com.
For more information: Owen Gordon Director, Finance & Corporate Development Axela Biosensors Phone: (416) 260-9050 x2243 E-mail: o.gordon@axelabiosensors.com
Axela Biosensors, Inc.
CONTACT: Owen Gordon, Director, Finance & Corporate Development of AxelaBiosensors, +1-416-260-9050 x2243, o.gordon@axelabiosensors.com
Web site: http://www.axela.com/