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Mission Statement
Banyan's Center of Innovative Research is a unique research environment that fosters both basic and applied scientific excellence in disorders of the brain and other organ systems. The goal of the CoIR’s cutting edge research is to produce important advances in basic science and provides a rich pipeline for Banyan’s initiatives in diagnostics and therapy development.
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A fundamental challenge in biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies is to foster research supporting product pipelines without inhibiting the creative processes essential for scientific discovery. Banyan's CoIR provides a novel solution to this challenge by offering a supportive environment for research in fundamental problems associated with the pathobiology of injury and disease within a corporate infrastructure. Banyan's CoIR allows for a more rapid identification and response to commercial opportunities than would otherwise be available through academic settings. Close integration of programs relevant to biomarker and drug discovery facilitate development of new theranostics-based research platforms.
Theranostics for Organ Injury
Theranostics is a powerful new combination of technologies integrating development of therapies and biomarker-based diagnostics. One important goal of this approach is to provide a "therapy profile" from various biomarker in vitro tests that would characterize an individual patient and his/her response to drug treatment (Nature Biotechnology, 2006). These biomarkers could be derived from profiles of genes, metabolites and/or proteins. Although theranostics has primarily been applied to disease states, Banyan Biomarkers has developed a novel theranostic platform specifically modified to develop therapies for organ injury, including traumatic brain injury (TBI). Unlike disease states, acute responses to trauma are much more influenced by changes in proteins rather than genes, and little is known about metabolic determinants; thus, the Banyan theranostics platform incorporates state-of-the-art proteomic technologies to identify proprietary biomarkers for development of therapies for organ injury such as TBI. This approach will allow Banyan to identify therapeutic candidates in a heterogeneous TBI population, will be optimal for drug responders and will confirm the drug response in an individual patient.
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