HISTORY
Pronostics was officially launched in December 2006 following the successful merger, in June 2006, of SmartBead Technologies Ltd, a Cambridge, UK, based technology and diagnostics company who had developed a unique barcoded multiplexing platform, UltraPlex™, and FingerPrint Diagnostics Ltd, also based in Cambridge, UK, a company with a technological lead in the development of low-cost molecular profiling methods.
SmartBead was founded in June 2000 to exploit barcoded microparticle technology originally initiated by Sentec Limited, a Cambridge based high-tech consultancy company, and the world renowned Cavendish Laboratory, Microelectronics, Biochemistry and Medicine Departments at the University of Cambridge, UK. With financial support from the leading European Venture Capital fund BankInvest Biomedical Venture, who have more than €410 million under management in the life sciences area, SmartBead had developed the UltraPlex™ technology to the point of having designed and developed an automated walk-away reader system and integrated robotic fluid handling system with a fully CE marked multiplexed diagnostic product, ANAscreen™ to the point of commercial launch.
But UltraPlex™ has potential way beyond what has already been achieved. UltraPlex™ is not just “another” multiplexing solution, it has a number of unique advantages, paramount among them being its reach into the genuinely high multiplex domain. Where our multiplexing platforms can theoretically run a hundred assays in parallel, with UltraPlex™ a million-plex assay is well within range!
FingerPrint Diagnostics Limited was founded in September 2002 as a joint venture with Metabometrix Ltd to investigate the commercial diagnostic opportunities arising from their pioneering work using NMR-derived metabolic profiles to diagnose coronary heart disease with world-beating sensitivity and specificity. Quickly, however, it became clear that existing profiling technologies were an order of magnitude too costly to achieve commercial success in anything but a niche market.
FingerPrint Diagnostics set about solving this conundrum, with the development of its proprietary FingerPrint technology platform: a novel and genuinely low cost method for generating molecular profiles useful for the diagnosis of disease. By measuring the antibody response to thousands of separate antigens, arrayed in a proprietary library design, FingerPrint Diagnostics could match the sensitivity and specificity of NMR-based metabolic profiles but at one tenth the cost.
Generating a molecular profile using FingerPrint technology is a high multiplex problem (hundreds or thousands of separate assays need to be run to generate the profile), and is therefore ideally suited to the UltraPlex™ platform. Indeed, a comprehensive survey and projects undertaken by FingerPrint Diagnostics showed that none of the competitors to UltraPlex™ were suitable for implementing their revolutionary profiling methodology.
Born out of this obvious scientific synergy, the merger to form Pronostics has yielded a company with a broad and complementary asset portfolio, backed by strong IPR protection, and driven forward by an industry-leading management team. Not only are the technology platforms synergistic, our vision for the future of in vitro diagnostics is also shared: a Pronostics box on the desktop of every primary care physician yielding rapid, low cost diagnosis of a wide range of diseases.
