VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA,--(Marketwire - April 6, 2010) - The PROOF Centre of Excellence today announced it will partner with Luminex Corporation to bring critical biomarker tests to heart and kidney transplant patients. The tests, which will be available in hospital laboratories, will provide faster results than current tests, and will improve the health and quality of care available to patients following an organ transplant.

"Luminex is dedicated to improving the lives and health outcomes of transplant patients," said Mike Pintek, Senior Vice President of Operations with Luminex Corporation. "The PROOF Centre has expertise in discovering and using biomarkers to enhance the care these patients receive, and prevent complications that can occur following an organ transplant. We are pleased to partner with this organization to expand the tools available to physicians who treat transplant patients."

The PROOF Centre is a multi-sectoral not-for-profit collaboration of industry, academia, health care, government, patients and the public focused on discovering, developing, commercializing and implementing biomarkers for heart, lung and kidney failure. The PROOF Centre has discovered and internally validated blood-based proteomic and genomic biomarker tests to diagnose and predict allograft immune rejection in heart and kidney transplantation.

The PROOF Centre will collaborate with Luminex to further develop and clinically validate its biomarker tests on the Luminex xMAP® Technology platform, which is currently used in the clinical care of transplant patients. These innovative diagnostic tools will help reduce the need for expensive, invasive and fear-evoking post-surgery biopsies, and will reduce the burden of transplantation costs on the healthcare system by enabling earlier intervention and by personalizing patients' immunosuppressant therapies. PROOF intends to file for regulatory approval for the tests in 2011. 

"By guiding the need for biopsy tests with a reliable, quantitative blood biomarker test that measures proteins or genes in the blood, we can provide less expensive, better care while gaining insights into the biology of rejection or immune accommodation," said Dr. Bruce McManus, Director of the PROOF Centre of Excellence. "We are particularly pleased about our partnership with Luminex because of the company's leadership, expertise, experience, and market reach in this area. We expect Luminex's involvement will not only speed up processes and decrease hurdles in development, but also create a better and more meaningful product for patients, physicians, and our healthcare system."

The economic benefits of the PROOF Centre's biomarker tests are substantial with estimated cost savings in the tens of millions of dollars a year in Canada alone just considering heart transplants. The average heart transplant patient recipient undergoes at least a dozen of these invasive procedures in the first year alone. In Canada, each of these heart biopsy encounters costs more than $5,000. Although kidney biopsies are conducted less frequently than heart transplants, they too represent considerable discomfort, risks and difficulty for the patients, as well as significant costs and strain on resources in the healthcare system.

"This exceptional advancement will make a significant difference in the lives of patients like me who have been through a transplant and the resulting trauma and expense of biopsies," said Gordon Allan, a heart and kidney transplant recipient who has been a participant in the Biomarkers in Transplantation program since 2004.

About the PROOF Centre of Excellence

The Centre of Excellence for the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF Centre) discovers, develops, commercializes and implements bio-molecular markers (biomarkers) to prevent, predict, diagnose and better treat and manage heart, lung and kidney failure. The PROOF Centre is a cross-disciplinary engine of devoted partners including those from industry, academia, health care, government, patients and the public focused on reducing the enormous socioeconomic burdens of heart, lung and kidney failure and on improving health.

The PROOF Centre is a not-for-profit society established in March 2008 by competitive funding from the Networks of Centres of Excellence Secretariat under the Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (NCE CECR) Program. The PROOF Centre is hosted by the University of British Columbia and is anchored in the Providence Heart + Lung Institute at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia. Partnered resources and core capabilities of the PROOF Centre, including patient cohorts, information management and technology platforms, are situated in Vancouver, elsewhere in British Columbia and Alberta, and around the world. www.proofcentre.ca.

About Luminex Corporation

Luminex Corporation develops, manufactures and markets proprietary biological testing technologies with applications throughout the diagnostic and life sciences industries. The Company's xMAP® multiplex solutions include an open-architecture, multi-analyte technology platform that delivers fast, accurate and cost-effective bioassay results to markets as diverse as pharmaceutical drug discovery, clinical diagnostics and biomedical research, including the genomics and proteomics markets. The Company's xMAP technology is sold worldwide and is already in use in leading clinical laboratories as well as major pharmaceutical, diagnostic and biotechnology companies. Further information on Luminex Corporation or xMAP can be obtained at www.luminexcorp.com.