LONDON: Oxford BioDynamics Plc is delighted to announce that it has today been recognised as a winner of the 2019 Queen’s Award for Enterprise, the most prestigious enterprise award given to UK businesses.
The Company has been granted the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation, demonstrating the outstanding performance and commercial success of OBD’s proprietary technology platform, EpiSwitch™, based on the latest advances in regulatory genome architecture and its functional links to patient stratifications and outcomes in oncology, neurodegenerative, inflammatory, metabolic and other indications.[the_ad id=”31605″]EpiSwitch™ is an innovative technology platform for the discovery, evaluation, validation and monitoring of a novel class of epigenetic biomarkers known as “chromosome conformation signatures”. These biomarker signatures can provide a compelling, stable framework from which changes in the regulation of a genome can be analysed, long before the results of these epigenetic changes manifest themselves as obvious abnormalities.
Validated EpiSwitch™ biomarker applications have demonstrated high efficacy in predictive, prognostic and diagnostic patient stratifications for lung, haematological, prostate, thyroid and skin cancers, as well as in rheumatoid arthritis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Baseline predictive stratifications by EpiSwitch™ for response to immune-checkpoint inhibitors are excellent surrogates for standard primary endpoints used in clinical trials, such as progression free survival. The Company has recently entered into its fifth collaboration agreement with a leading pharmaceutical company for the development of predictive biomarkers for immuno-oncology therapeutics. To date, EpiSwitch™ has been used to develop biomarkers on more than 6,500 blood samples in over 140 diverse projects.
The EpiSwitchTM platform is designed to accelerate drug discovery and development processes, improve success rates of therapeutic candidates, and reduce the overall cost of therapeutic development and health-care infrastructure by enabling precision medicine initiatives and empowering informed clinical decision-making.
Christian Hoyer Millar, Chief Executive Officer of Oxford BioDynamics, said: “We are delighted to have been chosen for such a prestigious award, which is an outstanding achievement for the Company. This award is recognised worldwide as a standard of enterprise excellence, reflecting the hard work and commitment shown by our team over the years in developing real-world solutions to unmet clinical needs of high priority. I’d like to extend my thanks to everyone at OBD for their part in this achievement.
“The award is a wonderful recognition of the value OBD and its EpiSwitch™ platform has generated, but also an acknowledgement of the innovative environment at the University of Oxford, from where OBD was spun-out. Together, we are helping to bring critical solutions onto the world stage.”