Last week's buys of two oncology labs will allow Quest to provide new cancer diagnostic technologies to communities lacking major cancer research centers, it said.
Castle will use the proceeds to accelerate marketing and new product development related to its molecular prognostic tests for patients with underserved cancers.
MultiGen said its test identified and confirmed the BRAF p.V600E mutation with a thousandfold increase in sensitivity compared to competing PCR-based and NGS methods.
Groups from Austria, Spain, Germany, and the US demonstrated that the GeneReader can reliably detect cancer mutations in tissue and liquid biopsy samples.
Following validation, the approach, which uses a deep convolutional neural network trained with almost 130,000 clinical images, could be developed into a smartphone app to detect skin cancer early.
The Taiwanese research team that developed the method showed in a new study that it could better detect BRAF mutations than conventional PCR plus Sanger sequencing.
The company has received grant funding for diagnostic development projects, and is also seeking its first pharma service customers to provide nearer-term revenue.
