Cambridge companies merge to create biological profiler

Two companies that began life in laboratories at Cambridge University, SmartBead Technologies Ltd (SBT) and FingerPrint Diagnostics Ltd (FPD), have merged to form a new medical diagnostics company to be called Pronostics Ltd.

Robert Booth, CEO of SBT, who will be CEO of Pronostics said, “This merging of interests will broaden and accelerate the availability of a new and revolutionary class of medical diagnostics, ‘pronostics’, based on biological profiling.”

“[Pronostics] will provide rapid and simple non-invasive diagnosis of diseases such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s and cancer,” he said.

SmartBead was founded in 2000 as a spin out of the Cavendish Laboratory University of Cambridge and Sentec Ltd, Cambridge UK, a specialist in multiplexing technologies. The company has taken established technologies from the microelectronics industry and combined them with existing bioassay technologies to provide the tagging and tracking benefits of barcodes at a microscopic level.  

In effect the technology barcodes molecules, and has the capacity to multiplex two to millions of individual tests simultaneously in the same vessel. As a result, large numbers of biological assays can be undertaken simultaneously in a single container. The technique is easier and cheaper to use than existing chip-based array technologies and cuts the cost and time of performing diagnostics in hospital laboratories by an order of magnitude.

FPD is developing a diagnostic test for coronary heart disease, called CADprint. The product utilises FPD’s proprietary platform technology for creating a biological fingerprint that allows the profiling of the complete immune system of an individual from a single simple blood sample.

Gaining access to SmartBead’s will bring down the cost of FPD’s profiling technology. David Grainger, founder and chief scientific officer of FPD, said, “Biological fingerprints based on genes or proteins have, to date, shown tremendous promise in research laboratories. However, this merger brings the commercial launch of profiling diagnostics within sight.”

Pronostics will continue to develop and sell the range of multiplexed diagnostics developed by SBT, initially focused on the area of autoimmune diseases. In parallel, the company will accelerate the development of the CADprint product, with the launch, supported by large-scale clinical trial data, expected in 2008.

The technology behind SBT arose out of a collaboration between Sentec Ltd and the Microelectronics Research Centre of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. FPD also started life in a Cambridge University laboratory.

“It is interesting and exciting to see how so much value can be created by bringing together what were initially separate ideas from our Physics Department at the Cavendish Laboratory and our Department of Medicine at Addenbrooke’s Hospital,” said Alastair Hick, Head of Life Sciences at Cambridge Enterprise. “Pronostics is set to become a model for the future of interdisciplinary research and commercialisation.”