April 5th 2011 – Paris, France and Créteil, France Biocortech, the biotech company dedicated to the development of biological diagnostics for personalized psychiatry, and FondaMental, the foundation of scientific cooperation for mental health research and care, announce the signing of a strategic alliance to validate biomarkers for personalized psychiatry.
This strategic alliance aims at speeding up the availability of qualified blood tests for diagnosis, prognosis, drug selection and monitoring for a personalized medical management of patients suffering from mental health disorders. Concretely, Biocortech and FondaMental will collaborate in clinically validating blood tests measuring biomarkers identified by Biocortech or in FondaMental’s network of scientific excellence. Biocortech and FondaMental will define relevant clinical settings and clinical issues to be addressed, build up adequate resources to access blood samples of patients with proper medical records, set up and monitor clinical trials. Biocortech will have responsibility for industrializing and commercializing qualified tests.
Dr Dinah Weissmann, Biocortech CEO, emphasizes « [that] there is a perfect fit between Biocortech and FondaMental. We both share the same vision of the forthcoming emergence of personalized medicine in psychiatry and we are equally convinced that scientific excellence is a key driver to make it happen. » Pr Marion Leboyer, Director of FondaMental, underlines « [that] mental health disorders are among the most frequent, disabling and costly conditions or diseases for healthcare systems in the world. Encouragingly, biomarker research in psychiatry which lagged behind biomarker research in other disease areas for years is now catching up. It is now critical to forge public-private, academic-industry partnerships such as the one we are entering into with Biocortech to turn promising biomarkers into so much needed blood tests.
About Biocortech
Biocortech is a biotechnology company dedicated to the development of biological tests to personalize medical management of patients suffering from psychiatric disorders, such as depression, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, suicidal behavior and cognitive deficits. Biocortech proprietary tests consist in assays to measure biomarkers associated to a biological mechanism known as ‘RNA editing’ in the blood and whose expression is affected by some psychiatric conditions and therapeutic drugs. Biocortech blood tests, whose clinical validation has been initiated, aim at better characterizing patients from a diagnosis, prognosis, treatment selection and monitoring viewpoints. Biocortech also developed a in vitro cell line assay to assess candidate drug’s risk to induce severe psychiatric side effects, such as depression or suicidal behavior, and to improve patient-treatment matching.
About FondaMental
The FondaMental foundation is a foundation of scientific cooperation created in June 2007 by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Its role: galvanize research in psychiatry to improve diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders and give new hope to patients and their families.
FondaMental foundation gathers more than 60 university-affiliated psychiatry departments and research laboratories. The foundation mostly focuses on most disabling psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, treatment resistant depression, and high level autism (Asperger syndrome). To face these issues, FondaMental foundation develop four missions: 1° Encouraging early diagnosis; 2° Accelerating psychiatric research in France; 3° Training health care professionals; 4° Inform the general public in order to change attitudes towards mental disorders.
Contact Information
Biocortech
Contact: Frédéric Allemand
Tel: +33 1 44 97 79 80
Email: fallemand@biocortech.com
Web: www.biocortech.com
FondaMental
Contact: Johanna Couvreur
Tel: +33 6 88 62 44 00
Email: johanna.couvreur@fondation-fondamental.org
Web: www.fondation-fondamental.org
