Mayo Clinic announced Tuesday that it has signed an agreement with Maryland-based A&G Pharmaceuticals that will ultimately pave the way for Mayo to offer the first commercial blood test to predict progranulin mutation status in patients suspected to have frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Through the agreement, Mayo will get a nonexclusive license to some of A&G Pharmaceuticals’ patent rights and proprietary antibody reagents that can help detect and measure progranulin in blood.
According to research published by Mayo, the mutation of the progranulin gene reduces levels of the protein progranulin in the brain and ultimately leads to dementia.
The test will be available to patients at the end of the year and is less costly than gene testing.
“The progranulin blood test provides an inexpensive tool to identify progranulin mutation carriers in patients with early onset dementia or asymptomatic relatives of FTD patients,” said Alicia Algeciras-Schimnich, assistant professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, in a news release.
