NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Cytox announced today that it and Cardiff University have been awarded an £800,000 ($1.1 million) grant from Innovate UK to test and validate the clinical utility of the British company's SNP-based risk assessment panel for Alzheimer's disease.
With the grant funding, Cytox and its academic collaborators at Cardiff will develop and test various polygenic risk score (PRS) algorithms with the company's SNPfitr software package. The algorithms will then be tested in large cohorts of Alzheimer's patients and cognitively normal subjects to show that the company's VariaTect SNP profiling array and an associated algorithm can effectively predict the presence of Alzheimer's pathology.
According to Cytox CEO Richard Pither, the new PRS algorithms will also be used in the development of a new VariaTect II array, and will include ones optimized for non-Caucasian populations and ones tested and trained on Alzheimer's patients with different phenotypic outcomes.
Cytox launched VariaTect in mid-2016 and offers the array in the US through a partnership with Norcross, Georgia-based Akesogen.