Singapore, Sep 07, 2010: Australian diagnostic company, HealthLinx has signed an exclusive OvPlex license agreement with Medison Pharma, an Israeli marketing company focused on high quality pharma, medical devices and diagnostics. Under the terms of the agreement, Medison Pharma will register and commercialize OvPlex in Israel.

This agreement grants Medison exclusive rights for 10 years to market, distribute and sell the OvPlex panel in Israel. The company will gain regulatory approval, and HealthLinx will then receive double-digit royalties, per unit on net sales. The country is now the fourth jurisdiction to secure an OvPlex licence following Australia, United Kingdom and Singapore.

Medison Pharma's diagnostics division is highly active in the field of personalized medicine, and exclusively markets Cepheid's GeneXpert and AutoGenomics' Infiniti for a variety of personalized molecular tests in the fields of cancer, genetics, pharmacogenomics and infectious diseases.

“Medison is proud to represent Healthlinx's OvPlex test in Israel. This service will enable the physicians with an early diagnosis of ovarian cancer, and as a result, provide an early treatment, which could save women's lives," said Dr Eliane Markowitz, Medison's Diagnostics Division manager.

The Israeli population is approximately 7.5 million people with a relatively high incidence of the disease. Compared to Australia, Israel is said to have double the rate of incidence of ovarian cancer. Because there is no community-based screening test for ovarian cancer, over 75 percent of cases are diagnosed in the advanced stages, and over 80 percent of these women, will die within five years. If ovarian cancer is detected at an early stage and effectively treated, the survival rate is more than 80 percent.

HealthLinx has also commenced its second larger study for OvPlex, aiming to prove a diagnostic accuracy of over 97 per cent for early stage ovarian cancer. This larger study is based on 1150 new samples using existing OvPlex biomarkers and including two novel biomarkers AGR2 and HTX010. This study has also received support with a $684,447 (A$750,000) grant from the Victorian State Government through the VSA Investment Fund.