Predictive medicine company PreMD Inc has filed a provisional patent application that describes a new simplified method of quantifying immunohistochemical staining of biomarkers. The provisional patent application was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark office. This application, based on PreMD's existing colour measurement patents and patent applications, may facilitate more accurate and cost-effective detection of biomarkers in clinical specimens.

"With the news earlier this year of breast cancer patients being incorrectly diagnosed and treated based on erroneous interpretation of immunohistochemistry tests it immediately came to our minds that our existing intellectual property and expertise in colour measurement may be useful in improving this critical situation. I am pleased to say that we have made significant headway in developing this concept and have submitted a provisional patent application that may be used to improve the scoring of immunohistochemical reactions resulting in more accurate and cost-effective determination of test results," said Dr Brent Norton, CEO of PreMD.

"Biomarkers, detected in human tissue samples by immunohistochemistry, are playing an increasingly important role in prognosis and treatment decisions and the new methodology has the potential to be applicable to a broad range of such biomarkers. In the lab, with our limited budget, resources and test samples, we are getting accurate positive results in 90 per cent of cases and full agreement in over 80 per cent of all tests. To take this program to the next step we need to find a way, in these markets, to fund the development and testing," he added.

PreMD is a leader in predictive medicine, dedicated to developing rapid, non-invasive tests for the early detection of life-threatening diseases.