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 licenseto 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,” saidAlicia Algeciras-Schimnich, assistant professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the CollegeofMedicine, Mayo Clinic, in a news release.
By Arundhati Parmar
Arundhati Parmar is the Medical Devices Reporter at MedCity News. She has covered medical technology since 2008 and specialized in business journalism since 2001. Parmar has three degrees from three continents - a Bachelor of Arts in English from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India; a Masters in English Literature from the University of Sydney, Australia and a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University in Chicago. She has sworn never to enter a classroom again.More posts by Author
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