New company seeks collaboration

Molecular diagnostic company, Abcodia, has been granted rights to commercialise intellectual property from one of the UK’s largest biobanks and is seeking new collaborative partners.

Abcodia – launched in March 2011 – hope to make groundbreaking discoveries and improve the diagnosis of many common life-threatening and debilitating diseases such as cancers, diabetes, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

The biobank – created by lead clinical scientists at UCL – contains serum derived from over 200,000 initially healthy volunteers. It now comprises 500,000 samples, many from volunteers who have provided samples annually. The availability of such large numbers of longitudinal prospective samples, together with data that allows the identification of all major age-related diseases in this cohort, makes it an ideal resource for investigations relating to screening diagnostics.

Abcodia is now seeking collaborative partners to achieve the best outcomes and is keen to harness a network of molecular technology collaborators and commercial diagnostic partners.

“With the rapid advanced in molecular technologies, this is a very exciting area to be working in right now,” said CEO Julie Barnes. “I am delighted to be able to lead the company through the early stages of its formation and look forward to working collaboratively with others who share our passion in discovering new molecular biomarkers for many of our common disease.”

“The establishment of Abcodia provides exciting opportunities to derive health benefits for large numbers of people at risk from the many potentially life threatening conditions that affect us with increasing age,” said Professor Ian Jacobs, dean of biomedical sciences at UCL and principal investigator of the UKCTOCS trial from where the serum biobank derived. “The established serum biobank is uniquely placed for screening diagnostics and I look forward to working with Abcodia.”