Asterand Awarded Contract Totaling up to $24.3 million with the National Cancer Institute
October 04 2010 - 9:00AM
Business Wire
Asterand plc (LSE: ATD), (“Asterand” or the “Company”), a
leading provider of human tissue and human tissue-based services to
pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies engaged in drug
discovery research announced today that it has been awarded a
5-year, up to $24.3 million contract with the National Cancer
Institute (NCI) to supply clinically annotated human biospecimens
for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. The base award is
valued at $5.4 million over 17 months; with provisions for renewal
at the NCI’s option. The contract is partly funded by the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Asterand’s Chief Executive Officer, Martyn Coombs
noted:
“We are honored that the NCI has selected Asterand as a partner
for this prestigious project. The TCGA will revolutionize the
molecular understanding of cancer. This project emphasizes the
significant impact of well characterized and high quality human
specimens on modern biomedical research. We feel privileged to play
a role in enabling the NCI to advance this critical research and
accelerate the development of new treatments and diagnostic tools
for this disease. Furthermore, the contract plays an important part
in our strategy to expand our work with government
institutions.”
ABOUT ASTERAND
Asterand plc is a leading supplier of high quality human tissue
and tissue-based services. Our comprehensive approach to human
tissue and research services offers pharmaceutical, biotech and
diagnostic companies the unique opportunity to have one Company
meet all of their human biomaterial needs along the continuum of
drug discovery and development. Our mission is to accelerate target
discovery and compound validation and enable pharmaceutical and
biotechnology companies to take safer and more effective drugs into
the clinic.
Asterand offers unparalleled access to human biospecimens for
research purposes. The Company manages a network of more than 100
active collaborative donor institutions and maintains a repository
of several hundred thousand specimens for immediate shipment. In
addition, human tissues and clinical data can be custom collected
to meet special requirements; including the collection of follow-up
data related to patient outcome. Asterand’s renowned quality
assurance procedures provide stringent controls on specimen
collection; characterization and on the corresponding clinical
data. These procedures allow researchers to choose samples that
will best meet their scientific requirements.
ABOUT THE CANCER GENOME ATLAS
The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is a comprehensive, coordinated
effort to accelerate the understanding of the molecular basis of
cancer through the application of genome analysis technologies.
TCGA is a joint effort of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and
the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). The TCGA
began as a pilot project in 2006 to test the feasibility of a
full-scale effort to systematically explore the genomic changes
involved in human cancers. The success of the pilot has resulted in
an expansion of the project to analyze 20 or more additional
cancers to yield a comprehensive, rigorous and publicly accessible
data set that will improve the diagnosis, treatment and prevention
of cancer. Learn more at http://cancergenome.nih.gov.
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