NEW YORK – Guardant Health and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust said this week that they have partnered to establish an in-house liquid biopsy testing service for cancer diagnostics at the Royal Marsden that will use Guardant's sequencing test technology. The service is expected to become operational at the end of 2022 and will be available for clinical care and clinical research.
GNS Healthcare and Scipher Medicine have partnered to develop and launch Gemini — The in silico Patient, for rheumatoid arthritis. This patient model uses Scipher's proprietary clinic-genomic patient data in RA, generated from PrismRA, the company's liquid signature blood test that predicts non-response to TNFi therapies in rheumatoid arthritis patients. The model links drug treatment, patient characteristics, and genetic and molecular mechanisms and pathways driving clinical outcomes, enabling the simulation of disease progression and drug response for patients. Through these simulations, Gemini discovers novel drivers of progression and treatment response to enhance clinical trial design and comparative effectiveness evidence generation for the treatment of RA, the companies said.
Centogene said this week that it has expanded its existing partnership with Agios Pharmaceuticals. Under the new, three-year fee-for-service agreement, Centogene will provide genetic testing and support for three global clinical trials Agios is conducting in thalassemia and sickle cell disease. Specifically, Centogene will test patients for causative mutations, including in the HBA1, HBA2, and HBB genes. Previously, the company had provided support for Agios' pyruvate kinase deficiency clinical program.
Veracyte this week said its Immunoscore Colon Cancer Test has been included in the "Pan-Asian adapted European Society for Medical Oncology Clinical Practice Guidelines." The Immunoscore test, which Veracyte acquired earlier this year through its acquisition of HalioDx, measures patients' immune response at the site of colon tumors and informs the use of chemotherapy. ESMO adapted the 2020 version of its "Clinical Practice Guidelines for Diagnosis, Treatment, and Follow-up of Colon Cancer" for patients in Asian countries based on the consensus opinions of 14 experts from cancer societies in Japan, China, India, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. The guidelines state that tumor recurrence risk estimates and predictions about chemo benefit are both important considerations when deciding on therapy and recommend taking into account ethnic differences associated with the treatment of Asian patients with localized colon cancer. In this context, the company said, Immunoscore has been recommended for its ability to refine the prognosis of stage II and stage III colon cancer patients, in conjunction with standard cancer staging.
Thermo Fisher Scientific said this week that its board of directors has authorized a quarterly cash dividend of $.26 per common share, payable on Jan. 14, 2022, to shareholders of record as of Dec. 15, 2021.
Biofortuna, a specialist contract development and manufacturing partner for the IVD and point-of-care testing markets, said this week that it has more than doubled its manufacturing capacity after relocating to new facilities in Deeside, North Wales. The new premises provide 450m³ of humidity-controlled clean room environment for formulation, dispensing, manufacturing, and analysis of more than 10 million reactions per week. "This multi-million-pound investment demonstrates our ambition and commitment to become the sectors' leading support specialist, helping our customers to accelerate their diagnostic development programs from concept to commercialization," Biofortuna CEO Nick Ash said in a statement.
In Brief This Week is a selection of news items that may be of interest to our readers but had not previously appeared on 360Dx.