PROOF Centre of Excellence Joins Forces with Luminex Corporation to Improve Health Outcomes of Transplant Patients

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA,, Apr 06 (MARKET WIRE) --
The PROOF Centre of Excellence today announced it will partner with
Luminex Corporation to bring critical biomarker tests to heart and kidney
transplant patients. The tests, which will be available in hospital
laboratories, will provide faster results than current tests, and will
improve the health and quality of care available to patients following an
organ transplant.

"Luminex is dedicated to improving the lives and health outcomes of
transplant patients," said Mike Pintek, Senior Vice President of
Operations with Luminex Corporation. "The PROOF Centre has expertise in
discovering and using biomarkers to enhance the care these patients
receive, and prevent complications that can occur following an organ
transplant. We are pleased to partner with this organization to expand
the tools available to physicians who treat transplant patients."

The PROOF Centre is a multi-sectoral not-for-profit collaboration of
industry, academia, health care, government, patients and the public
focused on discovering, developing, commercializing and implementing
biomarkers for heart, lung and kidney failure. The PROOF Centre has
discovered and internally validated blood-based proteomic and genomic
biomarker tests to diagnose and predict allograft immune rejection in
heart and kidney transplantation.

The PROOF Centre will collaborate with Luminex to further develop and
clinically validate its biomarker tests on the Luminex xMAP(R) Technology
platform, which is currently used in the clinical care of transplant
patients. These innovative diagnostic tools will help reduce the need for
expensive, invasive and fear-evoking post-surgery biopsies, and will
reduce the burden of transplantation costs on the healthcare system by
enabling earlier intervention and by personalizing patients'
immunosuppressant therapies. PROOF intends to file for regulatory
approval for the tests in 2011.

"By guiding the need for biopsy tests with a reliable, quantitative blood
biomarker test that measures proteins or genes in the blood, we can
provide less expensive, better care while gaining insights into the
biology of rejection or immune accommodation," said Dr. Bruce McManus,
Director of the PROOF Centre of Excellence. "We are particularly pleased
about our partnership with Luminex because of the company's leadership,
expertise, experience, and market reach in this area. We expect Luminex's
involvement will not only speed up processes and decrease hurdles in
development, but also create a better and more meaningful product for
patients, physicians, and our healthcare system."

The economic benefits of the PROOF Centre's biomarker tests are
substantial with estimated cost savings in the tens of millions of
dollars a year in Canada alone just considering heart transplants. The
average heart transplant patient recipient undergoes at least a dozen of
these invasive procedures in the first year alone. In Canada, each of
these heart biopsy encounters costs more than $5,000. Although kidney
biopsies are conducted less frequently than heart transplants, they too
represent considerable discomfort, risks and difficulty for the patients,
as well as significant costs and strain on resources in the healthcare
system.

"This exceptional advancement will make a significant difference in the
lives of patients like me who have been through a transplant and the
resulting trauma and expense of biopsies," said Gordon Allan, a heart and
kidney transplant recipient who has been a participant in the Biomarkers
in Transplantation program since 2004.

About the PROOF Centre of Excellence

The Centre of Excellence for the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF
Centre) discovers, develops, commercializes and implements bio-molecular
markers (biomarkers) to prevent, predict, diagnose and better treat and
manage heart, lung and kidney failure. The PROOF Centre is a
cross-disciplinary engine of devoted partners including those from
industry, academia, health care, government, patients and the public
focused on reducing the enormous socioeconomic burdens of heart, lung and
kidney failure and on improving health.

The PROOF Centre is a not-for-profit society established in March 2008 by
competitive funding from the Networks of Centres of Excellence
Secretariat under the Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and
Research (NCE CECR) Program. The PROOF Centre is hosted by the University
of British Columbia and is anchored in the Providence Heart + Lung
Institute at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Partnered resources and core capabilities of the PROOF Centre, including
patient cohorts, information management and technology platforms, are
situated in Vancouver, elsewhere in British Columbia and Alberta, and
around the world. www.proofcentre.ca.

About Luminex Corporation

Luminex Corporation develops, manufactures and markets proprietary
biological testing technologies with applications throughout the
diagnostic and life sciences industries. The Company's xMAP(R) multiplex
solutions include an open-architecture, multi-analyte technology platform
that delivers fast, accurate and cost-effective bioassay results to
markets as diverse as pharmaceutical drug discovery, clinical diagnostics
and biomedical research, including the genomics and proteomics markets.
The Company's xMAP technology is sold worldwide and is already in use in
leading clinical laboratories as well as major pharmaceutical, diagnostic
and biotechnology companies. Further information on Luminex Corporation
or xMAP can be obtained at www.luminexcorp.com.

Contacts:
To arrange an interview contact:
PROOF Centre of Excellence
Leah Lockhart
604-806-9853
leah.lockhart@hli.ubc.ca
www.proofcentre.ca

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