ChondroGene Limited of Toronto, Canada, has received financial support from the Canadian National Research Council's Industrial Research Assistance Program to further develop a blood-based test to stage osteoarthritis (OA) and to detect early, asymptomatic disease.

ChondroGene believes that its assays will provide a simple and effective way of monitoring disease progression during clinical trials of emerging disease-modifying OA drugs. The initial development of this test follows the completion by ChondroGene of the characterization of the chondrocyte transcriptome (including genes expressed in healthy and diseased human cartilage cells) and the production of the ChondroChip^TM, the first cDNA microarray made specifically for the analysis of human cartilage gene expression. ChondroGene has determined that the cartilage transcriptome comprises between 13,200 and 15,800 unique genes, and recently reported the first comprehensive mapping of cartilage transcripts to the human genome.¹

Following on these achievements, ChondroGene recently began a $7.35 million, 2-year research collaboration with Pfizer Inc to identify novel biomarkers for the detection and staging of OA, and to use ChondroGene's proprietary clinical OA database and ChondroChip^TM to identify potential new therapeutic targets. This collaboration is the second such developmental partnership between ChondroGene and Pfizer.