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Transgenomic Announces Leading Clinical Laboratory Services Provider LifeLabs Selects ICE COLD-PCR as Its Mutation Enrichment PlatformTransgenomic, Inc. (TBIO) (NASDAQ: TBIO), today announced a licensing agreement with leading Canadian laboratory services provider LifeLabs, which has selected Transgenomic's ICE COLD-PCR (News - Alert) (ICP) technology as its mutation enrichment platform for cancer testing. The three-year, renewable agreement includes a non-exclusive license to the ICP technology in Canada. Separately, Transgenomic also announced issuance of a new Canadian patent for ICP. "LifeLabs is among the largest laboratory service providers in North America, and we view their adoption of ICE COLD-PCR as a key validation of both the technology and our commercial model that focuses on licensing to a wide variety of molecular diagnostics partners worldwide," commented Paul Kinnon, President and Chief Executive Officer of Transgenomic. "We believe that this sizable commercial licensing agreement is indicative of the growing traction in the marketplace we have been anticipating, and we believe that it will be followed by additional significant ICP agreements going forward." LifeLabs intends to use ICE COLD-PCR with tissue samples and is receiving a non-exclusive license to the ICP technology in Canada. The three-year renewable agreement also allows LifeLabs to benefit from technology improvements and additional product launches during its term. "As the largest laboratory service provider in Canada, LifeLabs is committed to offering our customers access to advanced clinical genomic analyses made possible by major new technologies such as ICE COLD-PCR," said Joby McKenzie, Senior Vice President, Business Development of LifeLabs. "We anticipate that this flexible, versatile mutation enrichment technology will be applied to other molecular testing applications as adoption of genomic and precision medicine expands." Recently-issued Canadian Patent No. 2792433, Full Cold-PCR Enrichment with Reference Blocking Sequence, covers the use of the ICE COLD-PCR method that enriches mutated DNA sequences in a background of normal DNA through to 2030. This method can be applied to the analysis of very low quantities of circulating tumor DNA found in a patient's blood. Transgenomic's ICE COLD-PCR technology delivers up to a 500-fold increase in mutation detection compared to most current methods, with levels of detetion routinely achievable down to 0.01%. This ultra-high sensitivity enables detection of low level mutations that allow accurate patient monitoring as well as stratification of cancer sub-populations. ICP works well with most patient samples, including tissue, blood, plasma, urine and other biofluids and it is compatible with most of the downstream genomic analytic platforms commonly available in laboratories today. ICE COLD-PCR was originally developed by the laboratory of Dr. Mike Makrigiorgos at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which has exclusively licensed worldwide rights to the technology to Transgenomic.
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