Compandia is now CompanDX

Compandia has announced a name change to CompanDX. The company is a biomarker discovery company providing services to the Pharma and Biotech sectors but increasingly, as a result of in-house R&D, is identifying biomarkers that may lead to new diagnostic services and products of its own. Andy Sutton CEO of CompanDX explained "we have grown the service side of the business over the last 9 months and are delivering biomarker discovery services to large pharma, small biotech and diagnostic companies. We and our investors have always recognised the significant upside potential in the research work we conduct with collaborators and in the laboratories of our founders, the new name reflects this activity as we start to build our IP portfolio around the signatures and biomarker panels we are developing."

CompanDX also announced the launch of its new "Time to an Event" breast cancer gene panel. CompanDX presents a plenary session today at the British Breast Cancer meeting in Nottingham describing the use of its Risk Distiller bioinformatics tools to deliver the first diagnostic that predicts time to a clinical event. CompanDX scientists have used three public datasets from different clinics to derive a 31 gene signature that predicts time to metastasis following initial surgery and biopsy. The gene signature was subsequently validated on a fourth dataset from yet another clinical centre. Across these patient cohorts the actual versus signature predicted time to metastases has a correlation of 0.86 (p< 0.0001). Furthermore CompanDX for the first time has predicted a "prospective Kaplan Meier curve" which accurately tracks the actual survival curve from the combined data. Here median time to event in the patient population was 3.5 years, this was predicted to be 3.7 years by the CompanDX gene signature with no significant differences between the actual and the CompanDX curves (p = 0.555). Andy Sutton commented "We are very excited about this study, firstly it is real world data from different labs, with no abstraction of outlying patient data. Furthermore it is a 'world first' of a totally new type of diagnostic paradigm with potential to significantly alter clinical management."

CompanDX has applied funding to validate this in the clinic and has secured collaboration with leading clinical centres in London, Nottingham, Cardiff and Holland and also industry support from a world leading diagnostics company in the development of the assay.