MONTREAL, October 6 /PRNewswire/ --
Caprion Proteomics Inc. announced today that it has been awarded a US$12.9 million contract by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the US National Institutes of Health, to carry out Biodefense research in the area of infectious disease biomarkers.
Under the contract to be performed over a five-year period, Caprion will act as one of two NIAID Clinical Proteomics Centers for Infectious Disease & Biodefense, and will employ its distinctive CellCarta(R) quantitative protein profiling technologies to perform several large scale applied proteomics projects using human clinical samples from patients with infectious diseases. The projects will be aimed at the discovery, qualification, and verification of candidate biomarkers with potential for clinical use to improve detection and diagnosis and to monitor therapeutic and vaccine responses and susceptibility to infection for diseases caused by various pathogens. This second major Biodefense research contract awarded to Caprion by NIAID builds on the expertise and results demonstrated by Caprion as part of an initial contract awarded in 2004 and still in progress.
"We are very pleased to be granted the opportunity to expand our infectious disease research program with NIAID into the area of clinical biomarker discovery and validation," said Martin LeBlanc, President and CEO at Caprion. "This second major contract award from the NIAID provides further evidence of Caprion's solid scientific capabilities and industry leadership position as a proteomics and biomarker services provider."
Caprion will retain rights to commercialize candidate biomarkers and diagnostic products discovered in this project.
About Caprion Proteomics, Inc.
Caprion Proteomics is the leading provider of proteomics based services to the pharmaceutical industry. Caprion's proprietary proteomics discovery technology, CellCarta(R), is a gel-free, label-free mass spectrometry platform that enables a comprehensive, quantitative and robust measurement of the protein expression differences across large sets of biological samples. Caprion has been providing biomarker and target identification services since 2002, and has served such clients as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, Biogen Idec, Daiichi-Sankyo, Mitsubishi-Tanabe, Wyeth, AstraZeneca, Merck, Boehringer Ingelheim, ICOS, Bayer-Schering, EMD-Serono, Vertex, DebioPharm and Transgene. Caprion also has been awarded two major 5-year Biodefense proteomics research contracts in infectious disease with the NIH-NIAID. For more information, please visit: http://www.caprion.com.
Contact: Didier Jean-Francois +1-514-228-3625 dfrancois@caprion.com
Web site: http://www.caprion.com
Didier Jean-Francois of Caprion Proteomics Inc., +1-514-228-3625, dfrancois@caprion.com
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