PHILADELPHIA, April 25, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — CytoVas, LLC and BD Biosciences, a division of BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), announced today they have formed a strategic alliance to jointly develop a new blood-based diagnostic test to predict individualized patient risk of heart attack and stroke.
This test, currently called the Vascular Health Profile (VHP), fills a major unmet need in cardiovascular medicine. Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD) affects over 82 million people in the US and remains the leading cause of death throughout the developed world. In the next few years worldwide CVD-related complications and costs are expected to dramatically increase coincident with the growing prevalence of diabetes. Despite this immense and increasing demand, no reliable predictive measure exists to help physicians stratify risk for individual patients and optimize decisions for therapeutic intervention and management.
“The Vascular Health Profile offers a critical advance in cardiovascular care,” said Emile Mohler , MD, a cardiologist and Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-inventor of the technology. “As cholesterol testing has been shown non-predictive of true health outcomes, we need a test that can accurately guide therapeutic decision-making.”
CytoVas, LLC was founded under the University of Pennsylvania UPstart incubator program by Jonni S. Moore , PhD, and Wade Rogers , PhD, of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, along with Dr. Mohler, all faculty members of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
