suPARnostic™ Implemented as Monitoring Tool in Denmark’s Largest HIV Hospital


“The collaboration with Hvidovre Hospital to implement the suPARnostic™ kit in the routine monitoring of all of their HIV patients is a major acknowledgement of the product’s value and potential benefit,” says ViroGates CSO, Jesper Eugen-Olsen.

  

Sales of suPARnostic™ Begin in South Africa


In August 2006, ViroGates recorded its first sale of the suPARnostic™ kit in South Africa.
ViroGates has also recently entered into agreements with distributors and researchers in the EU, the Baltic Region and Israel to oversee the sales of suPARnostic™ for both commercial and research use.

  

suPARnostic™ Introduced at the XVI World AIDS Conference in Toronto 2006


In 2006, at the XVI World AIDS Conference in Toronto, suPARnostic™ was introduced for the first time as a commercially available kit for researchers and caregivers alike.  Dr. Eugen-Olsen also presented 2 papers, “suPARnostic™, a novel and simple assay for monitoring HIV disease progression” (download) and “V-suPAR baseline levels in children at time of ART initiative are predictive of treatment efficacy” (download), both of which highlight the strong predictive value of suPARnostic™ in monitoring disease progression.

  

ViroGates Awarded EU Grant for Tuberculosis Research

  

In 2003, ViroGates received a grant of €375,000 from the European Union’s 6th Frameworks Program for research and technological development. The grant was awarded to support the development of a novel test kit for Tuberculosis (TB) treatment efficacy in order to provide doctors with an effective tool to manage TB treatment in resource poor settings.
The two-year project was initiated in January 2005 in corporation with the Bandim Health Project in Guinea Bissau. To date, with the goal to establish a TB treatment efficacy marker, we have treated more than 400 TB infected individuals, trained local staff to ensure sustainability in a region which has suffered from civil wars, and served to rebuild the country’s National Tuberculosis Laboratory with equipment reagents.


A Short History  


In 1999, researchers at the University Hospital of Copenhagen and at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan discovered that the amount of the soluble form of a certain protein, V-suPAR, had a strong predictive value in HIV/AIDS disease progression and mortality. The results were first presented in 2000 at the 13th International AIDS Conference in South Africa and soon after, ViroGates was founded in 2001 in order to commercialize the results achieved by Dr. Jesper Eugen-Olsen, University Hospital in Copenhagen.
A first attempt to create a novel prognostic tool to monitor patient disease progression was made, and in 2006 it resulted in the creation of ViroGates’ first product - suPARnostic™ - a simple blood test designed to improve disease management.  

Since the first discovery, further studies have revealed that V-suPAR carries strong prognostic (disease progression) value in serious infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, sepsis, HIV and meningitis.