The Immune Tolerance Institute Announces Collaboration with Beckman Coulter Establishing...

The Immune Tolerance Institute Announces Collaboration with Beckman Coulter
Establishing a Multiplatform Immunophenotyping/Immunogenotyping Laboratory
- Center for Critical Path Immunology created to discover and develop
biomarkers for immune system-related diseases -

SAN FRANCISCO, March 31 /PRNewswire/ -- The Immune Tolerance Institute,
Inc. (ITI) today announced a collaboration with Beckman Coulter, Inc. to
establish a Center for Critical Path Immunology to investigate the role of the
human immune system in disease. This facility, which will be managed by ITI
and located initially at Beckman Coulter's Cellular Analysis Business Group in
Miami, FL, will integrate state-of-the-art genomic, cellular, proteomic and
bioinformatic technology platforms to elucidate immune function in patients
with a broad array of immune-related diseases. The Center will work with
academic and corporate partners to discover and develop novel, high-value
biomarkers that more effectively guide new drug development, including
companion diagnostics that match patients with therapies that will provide
them the greatest benefit.
"The establishment of ITI's Center for Critical Path Immunology is the
first step in bringing to fruition our mission to transform the drug discovery
process to one that identifies promising therapies in their early phases of
development, and that produces drug candidates that are safer, more highly
targeted and effective in treating immune system-related diseases," said Dr.
Louis A. Matis, President and Chief Executive Officer of ITI. "We are
extremely pleased to be partnering in this initiative with Beckman Coulter, a
world leader in the design and development of biomedical testing systems that
span research, clinical trials, and diagnostics."
"Advancing 'critical path' science will lead to new approaches to
investigate the biological mechanisms of disease and to better predict the
clinical efficacy and safety of emerging therapeutics. Such efforts have the
potential to enhance drug development and reverse the recent trends that have
led to higher failure rates and reduced numbers of annual new drug approvals,"
said Wade E. Bolton, Ph.D., Vice President of Custom BioPharma Solutions and
Services at Beckman Coulter. "Working with the ITI and their distinguished
scientific staff, we will be able to identify new solutions and make them
available for better patient management."
ITI is advancing a new paradigm for mechanism-based clinical development,
designed to better correlate clinical outcomes with underlying disease
mechanisms. The company's technologies are being deployed in high-throughput
fashion to perform comprehensive cellular, molecular and immunological assays
on specimens obtained from patients during clinical trials of emerging
immunotherapeutics. The mechanistic data that are generated from these assays
will be analyzed in parallel with clinical safety and efficacy data using
cutting-edge bioinformatic approaches that leverage new insights at the nexus
of emerging life science and information technologies. This approach to
critical path science is designed to shorten development times, reduce both
costs and failure rates in drug development and guide better informed patient
selection for targeted therapies.
The Immune Tolerance Institute (ITI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation
founded in partnership with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
to fill critical unmet needs for translating fundamental scientific
discoveries into new therapies for the broad range of diseases related to the
human immune system, including autoimmune diseases, allergy, asthma, cancer,
and cardiovascular and infectious diseases. ITI is a milestone and
value-driven not-for-profit company uniquely positioned at the intersection of
academia and biopharma that offers a comprehensive constellation of scientific
and bio-pharmaceutical industry expertise and services to convert knowledge-
based discoveries into market-accessible products for immune system related
conditions. The Institute is led by a management team with roots in both
biomedical research and the biotechnology industry, and a board of directors
including leaders in the field of translational medicine. For more
information, visit http://www.iti-immune.org.
SOURCE Immune Tolerance Institute, Inc.

Louis A. Matis, M.D. of Immune Tolerance Institute, Inc., +1-203-292-6940,
lmatis@iti-immune.org; or Media: Eric Goldman of Rx Communications Group,
+1-917-322-2563, egoldman@rxir.com