PrediLife (Euronext Growth Paris: ALPRE), a company developing innovative solutions predicting the risk of diseases to facilitate personalized medicine, is announcing that it is partnering with the Institut Curie for the launch of the next-generation of MammoRisk®, a test predicting breast cancer risk that now incorporates a polygenic score based on a saliva sample.

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Breast cancer: the world’s second-largest cause of mortality in women
Breast cancer, the second most common cancer worldwide, with 2.1 million new cases p.a., is responsible for over 620,000 deaths every year. The general screening programs introduced in many countries represent a major step forward for public health, but they still have certain limitations. These include their restriction to the over 50s, the risk of over-diagnosis, the problem of cancers developing between two mammograms, and false positives. That observation underlines the need for new solutions to be added to existing screening programs.

MammoRisk®: a test predicting and preventing the risk of breast cancer
Designed for prescription by doctors, MammoRisk® is a test complementing mammograms that predicts the risk of breast cancer by taking into account 5 risk factors: the patient’s age, breast density, family history (0, 1 or more antecedents), breast biopsy history and a polygenic score calculated using the latest scientific publications. This score is the product of analysis of hundreds of thousands of genome variations, polymorphisms or SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphisms). These common variations in the general population are polymorphisms. Some of these polymorphisms have been associated with a higher risk of breast cancer. On their own, these polymorphisms have a low impact, but certain combinations of them have a major impact on the risk of breast cancer, comparable to other well-known factors, such as breast density and family history (1st degree).

Ambitious collaboration plans
The partnership between PrediLife and the Institut Curie will initially study around a hundred polymorphisms associated with a higher risk of breast cancer, with the Institut Curie performing the genetic analyses incorporated in the MammoRisk® score. Subsequently, PrediLife and the Institut Curie will pursue research projects by capitalizing on the tight fit between the breast cancer expertise of the Institut Curie, Europe’s largest center for the treatment of women with cancer, and PrediLife’s ability to develop and market these tests.

Prof. Dominique Stoppa Lyonnet, Head of Institut Curie’s genetics department and Professor at Université Paris-Descartes, commented: “PrediLife’s approach of incorporating various different factors, including combinations of SNPs, is an interesting one, which may even be useful for women with a hereditary genetic predisposition (e.g., BRCA1, BRCA2). The aim of the partnership is to carry out part of the MammoRisk® test and, ultimately, to accelerate the research projects already being conducted by the Institut Curie’s genetics department in this field.”

“The collaboration underscores the ability of the Institut Curie’s genomics platform to provide academic and industrial partners, such as PrediLife, with technological tools for high-throughput genomic analysis”, added David Gentien, Head of the Institut Curie’s genomics platform.

Stéphane Ragusa, Founder, Chairman and CEO of PrediLife, commented: “We are delighted to be working together with the Institut Curie, one of the largest and internationally renowned cancer centers. This partnership is an endorsement of the reliability of our solution for predicting the risk of breast cancer. With the genetic component we have built in, MammoRisk® is now the only available test that takes into account the three pillars required for reliable and personalized predictions of the risk of breast cancer in the general population—clinical data, breast density and genetic polymorphisms.”

Amaury Martin, Executive Director of Institut Curie Technology Transfer and Industrial Partnerships Department and of Institut Carnot Curie Cancer, concluded: “This agreement exemplifies perfectly the Institut Curie’s joined-up co-development approach, which brings together clinicians, researchers and partner businesses. That shows the Institut Carnot’s appeal for the development of partnership-based research and underpins the Institut Curie’s positioning as a leading player in the development and use of new technologies to improve the treatment of cancer patients.”

About PrediLife - http://www.predilife.com/home.php

About Institut Curie -http://techtransfer.institut-curie.org/http://www.institut-curie.org