BioCardia has announced that the European Patent Office has issued the Company Patent No: 3063172 for “methods of measuring potential for therapeutic potency and defining dosages for autologous cell therapies.” A press release reports that BioCardia’s new patent is for a diagnostic approach for patient selection that identifies a specific biomarker signature in a patient’s bone marrow.

It adds that this test enables a physician to determine if a patient is a good candidate for either of the company’s two lead clinical indications of heart failure or chronic myocardial ischaemia prior to treatment, allowing for point-of-care processing of the therapy and eliminating the significant expense of selecting and processing cells remotely.

BioCardia CEO Peter Altman states: “Our diagnostic assay is a potential breakthrough in improving outcomes and dramatically reducing costs for autologous cardiac cell therapy. The assay serves as a quality control means of selecting the most appropriate patients for therapy and may in the future be used to set dosages for therapy. It also avoids the potential technical hurdles of allogenic cell therapy, using donor cells, which can create risks for patients.”

The Company has an issued USA patent covering this technology, as well as additional patents and patents pending for other proprietary technology related to its stem cell therapies in the USA, Europe, Japan, China and India.