Their technology, called AQUATM (Automated Quantitative Analysis) enables researchers to localize and quantify proteins in tissue while maintaining spatial relationships -- a process that was previously impossible with conventional methods of pathology analysis and which vastly increases the quality and amount of information for analysis.
The company provides contract services to academic institutions, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies while selectively licensing its technologies to leading academic and research laboratories.
"HistoRx is a great example of the continuing effort of Yale University to expand the biotechnology industry in the New Haven area," said Jon Soderstrom, managing director of the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale.
HistoRx has exclusive license to the AQUATM technology developed by two of the company's founders, David Rimm, M.D., and Robert Camp, M.D., both in the Department of Pathology at Yale. HistoRx also holds exclusive license to databases from Yale's tissue archive containing 20- to 40-year clinical follow up information corresponding to different types of human cancer. The School of Medicine's archive holds more than three million tissue samples collected over the past 70 years.
Robert Curtis, president, CEO and co-founder of HistoRx, said, "The company is grounded in the firm belief that the power of AQUATM, coupled with the extensive clinical data of the Yale tissue archive, provides an extraordinary new tool for substantial improvement in tissue analysis both for pharmaceutical research and development, and for patient care."
He said that HistoRx recently entered into feasibility studies with two major pharmaceutical companies and is scheduled to ship its first systems to two preeminent research universities this week.
According to Rimm, "AQUA is completely objective – it takes the subjectivity out of pathology diagnosis." Rana Gupta, an investment partner at Navigator Technology Ventures, said HistoRx's technology is not only novel and state-of-the-art, but it has the potential to significantly reduce the risk of clinical trial failure and move new drug candidates through the development process more quickly.
More information about HistoRx is available on the web at www.historx.com.