NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Natera said today that it will join the Investigation of Serial Studies to Predict Your Therapeutic Response with Imaging and Molecular Analysis 2 (I-SPY 2) clinical trial, a multi-center study evaluating the combination of investigational therapies and neoadjuvant treatment in women with breast cancer.
Natera will use its noninvasive circulating tumor DNA technology to analyze blood samples at different points in the women's treatment cycles. Natera's liquid biopsy technology will be compared to imaging for its ability to monitor tumor burden, treatment response, and residual disease.
The company will collaborate with Laura van 't Veer and Laura Esserman of the University of California, San Francisco and with QuantumLeap Healthcare Collaborative. It will design personalized liquid biopsy assays for each patient based on their tumor molecular profile and will monitor patients over time.
Esserman, the director of the breast care center at UCSF and founder of QuantumLeap, said in a statement that Natera's liquid biopsy technology will "hopefully improve our ability to inform the success of new agent/combinations and help us to design additional targeted interventions to successfully treat each patients."
Jimmy Lin, Natera's chief scientific officer of oncology, added that the I-SPY 2 trial "offers a large and very rare longitudinal patient population that will accelerate validation of our oncology products."
The trial started in 2010 and more than 1,000 patients have enrolled so far.