Diadem U.S. announced on Wednesday that the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging (NIA) had awarded it approximately $2.5 million as part of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) direct to Phase II grant.
The two-year grant will enable Diadem, a company that has been developing a blood-based test for the early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD), to leverage data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), a longitudinal multicenter study designed to enable development of biomarkers for the early detection and tracking of AD.
In a new study, Diadem plans to use all four ADNI patient cohorts to identify participants who were early progressors to AD in order to further validate the prognostic ability of its AlzoSure Predict blood test to identify these patients years before diagnosis.
The firm is developing and commercializing "prognostic and diagnostic biomarker tools for early identification of individuals who will or will not progress to AD within six years," Paul Kinnon, CEO of Diadem U.S. and a principal investigator of the planned study, said in a statement.
Leading researchers on Alzheimer's will participate in the study. The Biomarker Research Laboratory of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, will provide analytic support.
