OncoVista Innovative Therapies Inc. (OVIT.OB) Subsidiary Inks Deal for Research Project for Innovative Breast Cancer Testing

The agreement results in a three-year international breast cancer research project, COHERTA. According to AdnaGen AG, the Adnatest™ BreastCancer diagnostic blood test can lead to more effective evaluation and cost effective treatments without toxic side-effects.

The purpose of the COHERTA project is to identify more applications for CTC testing. TATAA Molecular Diagnostics and Czech Academy of Science have conducted collaborative research since 2008, and have played an integral role in demining the effectiveness of AdnaGen AG’s new prognostic and predictive biomarkers.

The international COHERTA study will take place in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and will focus on finding the relationship between metastasic tumors and HER2, the most aggressive type of breast cancer, which is diagnosed in one out of three breast cancers.

Researchers will conduct the tests using the Adnatest™ BreastCancer assay, and believe that through monitoring and research, a new application of the test could be used for patients with breast cancer relapse. Currently, the only way to evaluate the HER2-status of a tumor is through a biopsy of the tumor tissue.

“OncoVista Innovative Therapies Inc. is very pleased that AdnaGen’s Adnatest™ BreastCancer assays are being used exclusively in the COHERTA study. This next phase is another important step in identifying blood-based diagnostic and monitoring assays that work to the patient’s benefit,” Dr. Alexander L. Weis, president and CEO of OncoVista stated in the press release. “The Adnatest™ BreastCancer is just one of several on which OncoVista has been working on. It’s subsidiary, AdnaGen AG, has also been developing and testing other CE-certified circulating tumor cell (CTC) diagnostic assays for prostate and colon cancers. Together with breast cancers, prostate and colon cancers are the three most frequent types of cancer diagnosed today.”