Custom companion diagnostic, a must in drug development
At the dawn of the precision medicine era, targeting the right subset of patients and predict who will or will not respond to the treatment is of utmost importance. In these cases, relevant tools that would detect a set of biomarkers which would determine if a certain patient can react to a specific treatment and then to follow the patient response to that treatment are needed. These are called companion diagnostic and ideally each treatment would come with its own companion diagnostic. One of the best known pairs of therapeutic and his companion diagnostic is the Herceptin(R) and HerceptestTM to evaluate HER2 overexpression and specifically treat those patients.
The different pathways of interest for a certain pathology are monitored during the development and selection of bioactive compounds. Sometimes available commercial antibodies targeting their effective pathways are not necessarily specific for relevant samples or may not work in your desired applications. In many cases, the targeted pathways are so innovative that no products are available commercially. Whether the goal is to determine the phosphorylation level of specific sites or the proportion of different isoforms of a protein in your samples, custom diagnostic companion development should be part of the drug development from the start.
At MédiMabs, we can help you with your projects and find a custom-tailored solution to your project using our expertise in antibody development, custom multiplexing tools and diagnostic kit validation.