GENOMIC VISION

Promising Results from the New Telomere Length Assay (TLA) in the Scope of Development of Cancer Therapies

Regulatory News:

GENOMIC VISION (Paris:GV) (FR0011799907 – GV), a biotechnology company developing molecular and Artificial Intelligence tools to control quality and safety of genetically modified genome, announced today promising results from its strategic research partnership with the Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI, Sydney) with the purpose of understanding the effects of telomere length on complex diseases, notably cardiovascular diseases and cancers.

Telomeres are regions in the genome which protect the ends of the chromosome from deterioration and fusion with neighboring chromosomes. Human telomeres are linked with both cancer and ageing and as such, there is a considerable interest in determining the length of these essential structures.

The partnership set up between Prof. Hilda Pickett’s laboratory and Genomic Vision’s team on May 2018 aimed to explore the correlation between telomere shortening and cancer onset. Genomic Vision’s novel approach based on molecular combing, called the “Telomere Length Assay (TLA)”, is suitable to distinguish variations in telomere length with high accuracy and great reproducibility in human and other mammalian models.

Molecular combing technology has already been used by Genomic Vision and other laboratories to measure Telomere length, but it is the first time TLA is developed in the perspective of a therapeutic application.

Aaron Bensimon, Co-Founder and CEO of Genomic Vision declared: “After one year of collaborative work with CMRI, we are happy to report our first promising result on Telomere Length Assay (TLA). Associate Professor Hilda Pickett’s research investigates telomere stability and telomere length maintenance mechanisms in cancer. Pickett’s laboratory has used the Genomic Vision molecular combing platform and the TLA to measure the length of individual telomere in cancer cells. This technology can be applied to mouse and human models to investigate diseases involving telomere stability. The TLA combines a simple wet-lab protocol with Genomic Vision’s FiberStudio software. The results, obtained from our proprietary technology and the collaboration with CMRI, confirm that molecular combing provides strong advantages over classical methods in the field of telomere length measurement and studies of telomere modification.”