AUSTIN, Texas, May 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Rules-Based Medicine, Inc. a leading provider of multiplexed protein biomarker services, will be a collaborator on the Institut Pasteur research project Milieu Interieur (the environment within), funded through a LabEx grant from the French government. The project will rely on RBM's TruCulture(R), an innovative in vitro model that preserves physiological cellular interactions, to more accurately describe the complexities of the human immune system.

The Milieu Interieur project will take an unprecedented look at the human immune system, an intricate signaling network that protects against disease. Because the human immune system has such varied reactions to external stimuli it is difficult to predict individual responses to infection and medical therapies such as vaccines. A federation of renowned researchers and clinicians from Institut Pasteur, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), will integrate cutting-edge technology from a number of scientific disciplines including immunology, genomics, molecular biology and bioinformatics to establish the parameters that characterize the immune system of healthy individuals. Insightful analysis of this research will forge a direct path toward personalized medicine - tailoring the right therapeutic strategy for the right person at the right time.

"Susceptibility to infections, severity of disease, and response to medical therapies and vaccines are highly variable from one individual to another," said Matthew Albert, Director of the Department of Immunology, Institut Pasteur. "TruCulture is an ideal research tool that simplifies the sample collection and culturing process and will help to reveal the linkages between the genotypes and phenotypes that are responsible for immune system variability."

RBM's TruCulture system will be utilized for blood collection and culture and it is expected that at least 40,000 TruCulture tubes will be required to characterize the immune responses of the 1,000 participants. TruCulture is designed to capture immune cell activity while avoiding many of the variables often associated with sample collection and manipulation. An important advantage of this collection system is that cell stimulations are performed instantly, at the point of collection, which provides a more accurate snapshot of the subject's immune response. The use of TruCulture will allow researchers to describe individual differences at the genomic, proteomic, and inflammation pathway levels. The involvement of Rules-Based Medicine, Inc. as a partner will ensure timely development of new assays and application to relevant diseases.

On April 27, 2011, Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, a leader in molecular diagnostics, announced an agreement to acquire Rules-Based Medicine. The transaction is expected to be complete by May 31, 2011. RBM headquarters will remain in Austin, TX and will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Myriad Genetics under the name Myriad RBM.