It was announced this week that Warnex Medical Laboratories, a division of Warnex Inc., will be the Canadian distributor for three recently launched genetic biomarker diagnositc tests produced by Rosetta Genomics, Ltd. The tests, branded as miRview™, include a test for the detection and diagnosis of mesothelioma.

Warnex is a life sciences company providing laboratory services to the pharmaceutical and health care industries. The company will market the miRview™ products and will send samples gathered from the tests from Canada to the Rosetta Genomics laboratory in Philadelphia for analysis. Warnex has three facilities, located in Laval and Blainville, Quebec, and Thunder Bay, Ontario.

We’ve written about the miRview™ products on this site in the past. They include miRview™ mets, which can identify the primary tumor site in patients presenting with metastatic cancer; miRview™ squamous, which differentiates squamous from non-squamous, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC); and miRview™ meso, which leverages microRNA’s high specificity as biomarkers to differentiate mesothelioma from other carcinomas in the lungs.

All three of the miRview tests utilize MicroRNA technology. According to Rosetta Genomics, microRNAs (or miRNAs) are recently discovered, naturally occurring, small RNAs that act as master regulators and have the potential to form the basis for a new class of diagnostics and therapeutics. This is because microRNAs have been shown to have different expression in various pathological conditions, the observation of which can provide a novel diagnostic tool for many diseases.

According to Rosetta Genomics, the miRview™ meso product is a highly accurate test that can help physicians to more easily identify mesothelioma, which can be hard to differentiate from other cancers. The test also can help rule out a meso diagnosis in patients who have been diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the lung and who also have been exposed to asbestos, which is known to cause mesothelioma.

Tags: asbestos, biomarkers, diagnostics, mesothelioma, microRNA, miRNAs, miRview, Philadelphia, research, Rosetta Genomics, Warnex

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 10:34 am and is filed under News, Research/Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.