IntegraGen SA, a company specializing in the decoding of the human genome and performing interpretable genomic tests for academic and private laboratories and a developer of diagnostic tools in oncology, and Laboratoire CERBA, the European leader in specialized clinical pathology, serving more than 50 countries in Europe, Africa and Asia, announced  the signing of a licensing agreement allowing Laboratoire CERBA to develop and provide to prescribing clinicians a test based on IntegraGen’s proprietary miR-31-3p biomarker. Laboratoire CERBA will develop this test to complement its existing portfolio and further enable physicians to proactively identify metastatic colorectal cancer patients who will have increased benefit from treatment with anti-EGFR therapy. Financial details and terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
“Laboratoire CERBA has a longstanding history of providing innovative & clinically relevant tests to clinicians and patients, and it is a natural expansion of our testing portfolio to include miR-31-3p to our portfolio of tests. With this licensing agreement we remain at the forefront of precision medicine and are able to provide oncologists genomic information that will allow them to choose the optimal therapy for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, a disease that affects more than 170,000 patients in the EU,” declared Sylvie Cado, CEO of Laboratoire CERBA. “We look forward to making this test available for clinicians in the first half of 2017 once we have completed the validation steps in our laboratory.” “This new partnership with Laboratoire CERBA is a significant achievement for IntegraGen since it is a major step for the company’s diagnostics activities,” added Bernard Courtieu, IntegraGen’s CEO. “With the launch of our first proprietary test in Europe, it also represents the culmination of more than five years of research and development efforts, from the early stages of biomarker discovery to the availability of a miR-31-3p expression test for oncologists and patients. IntegraGen today delivers a big step in the field of personalized medicine since this test represents a major improvement for treating patients with metastatic colorectal cancer.”