Pharmaceutical pain management has aided billions of patients, but has also created millions of cases of addiction, a problem that is driving research into pain. Omowunmi Sadik of the New Jersey Institutes of Technology, said on a recent webinar that the Biosensor Materials for Advanced Research & Technology (BioSMART) Center, is working on a suite of biosensors that may aid in the detection of the molecular markers associated with pain.

The draft version of the U.S. Medicare national coverage analysis for blood-based biomarker tests for colorectal cancer (CRC) engendered a large body of support, but several stakeholders recommended that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) avoid prescriptiveness regarding the sensitivity and specificity for any tests that would be covered under the policy.

TORONTO – Toronto-based Sqi Diagnostics Inc. has reported significant clinical progress developing three novel COVID-19 tests for submission for U.S. FDA emergency use authorization.

PARIS – Integragen SA and OncoDNA SA have signed a tender offer agreement anticipating a takeover bid. Gosselies, Belgium-based OncoDNA will purchase 100% of the shares of Integragen, floated on the Euronext Paris Euronext Growth Markets, at a unit price of $2.60, valuing the latter’s share capital at $17.2 million.

Adarza Biosystems Inc.’s Ziva platform can simultaneously detect hundreds of proteins, antibodies, or substrates from a single drop of blood, plasma or serum, providing insight into an individual’s immune response. That could be critical for both surveillance and diagnostic purposes as the nation prepares for a likely second wave of the novel coronavirus in the fall when multiple respiratory pathogens will be circulating.

LONDON – With COVID-19 infection varying in severity from asymptomatic to lethal the search is now underway for biomarkers to predict which patients are most at risk of suffering severe disease. As one possibility, Menarini Silicon Biosystems (MSB) is using its Cellsearch liquid biopsy technology to capture and count circulating endothelial cells. Meanwhile, Oxford Biodynamics plc is applying its Episwitch platform to find prognostic and predictive epigenetic markers.

For depression, and other mental health disorders, the era of precision medicine has yet to arrive. Symptoms are “very poorly reflective of the underlying biology,” Amit Etkin told BioWorld. Depression can manifest through multiple different symptoms that differ both between and within cultures.

Early detection of neurodegenerative disease even before symptoms emerge is the ideal when it comes to trying to treat or prevent progression. But that has remained difficult, as brain tissue that isn’t available until after death is typically the most definitive. Now, researchers have used an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to identify genetic expression data over time and correlate them in blood and postmortem brain tissue samples from subjects with either Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s disease.