Biomarker Lab
From theory to service: discovering markers that save lives

Welcome to

Biomarker Lab


For discovery and service


The promise of biomarkers



The promise of precision medicine is to provide the right medicine at the right dose and the right time to the patient. This type of personalized therapy is more effective than the traditional intervention and results faster and more effective healing. Modern targeted therapies use molecular diagnostics and molecular biomarker analysis. Molecular biomarkers can be various biological features like a gene, a protein, cellular or other physiological functions, with which the healthy or abnormal biological processes can be characterized or can be used to evaluate the efficiency of therapeutic interventions. Molecular biomarkers can help diagnose and predict the onset of certain diseases, and their most likely outcome. Molecular biomarkers are already in use for certain diseases to determine the most appropriate therapy, or to monitor the efficacy and safety of the treatment.

Biomarkers are an essential part of the discovery and research of new pharmaceuticals, since they

  • shorten the time of clinical studies,
  • reduce the number of patients enrolled and
  • provide valuable information to enrich the licensing documentation and thus increase the substantiation of regulatory decisions.

Experts foresee the 2020's to be the period of explosive spread of biomarker-based medicine, and emphasize that all countries will need a center of knowledge to establish molecular biomarker research and foster its application, otherwise patients cannot benefit from the advantages of new therapies. They stress that nucleic acid based molecular biomarker studies are pioneers in clinical applicability, while other technologies, such as proteomics, epigenomics or functional analysis of cells require significant additional development to reach clinical application. In molecular biomarkers research, the so called omics analysis generate a significant amount of data, which cannot be properly analyzed without involvement of professional bioinformaticians. Only an interdisciplinary research is able to utilize the power of this Big Data, discover new biomarkers and develop meaningful software tools for clinicians or apps running on mobile devices of patients. Though the involvement of clinical bioinformaticians in biomarker research and implementation of personalized medicine is inevitable, there is a significant shortage of such researchers across Europe, and training cannot keep up with demands.


Our mission


Although the number of clinical drug examinations – in which molecular biomarker analysis plays a defining part - is numerous and constantly increasing in Hungary, there is no accredited biomarker laboratory in the country or even in Central and Eastern Europe to fully support such activities.

Servier Research Institute Inc. and CRU Hungary- both being leading participants in pharmaceutical research and in clinical pharmacy examination in Hungary – formed a research consortium together with Eötvös Loránd University and Research Centre for Natural Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to establish an internationally accredited, service providing molecular biomarker research Center in Hungary.

The biomarker laboratory is to be established in Budapest, at the Lágymányos Campus of Eötvös Loránd University as part of a newly built 5300 m2 five-story research complex. The lab aims to lead the national efforts in this field, providing competitive service both for the clinical and the pharmaceutical industry.

Research groups will be provided by the members of the consortium to perform professional tasks within the laboratory on the fields as follows: introduction of the accredited molecular biomarker laboratory; identification of new, potential molecular biomarkers; development of molecular biomarker based associate-diagnostic for the pharmaceutical industry; creation of a basis for national and regional molecular biomarker research and an automated „in vitro” system supporting the curing of oncologic patients.

In line with the professional research activities, the consortium also aims to create an innovation management service portfolio (related to IP protection, technology-transfer and incubation) and the Center will consolidate the bases of practical biotechnology education as well.