Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have developed a new open-source decision support tool designed to help clinicians chose the chemotherapy drug best suited for individual patients. The open-source support vector machine (SVM)-based algorithm predicted the chemotherapy drug that provided the best outcome with greater than 80% accuracy,…

Precision Therapeutics said today it agreed to acquire all shares of Helomics, up from its current 25% stake, in a deal designed to catapult the buyer into leadership in precision oncology. Minneapolis-based Precision Therapeutics has signed a letter of intent to buy the remaining Helomics shares it did not currently…

Tempus has raised an additional $80 million in financing, saying that proceeds will be used toward will be used toward further growing and scaling the company’s clinical and molecular analytic platform. The latest financing brings to $210 million the amount of capital raised by Tempus since it was launched in…

We are all colonized by vast quantities of microorganisms. Until recently, there has been little focus on how these microbes can help us stay healthy. However, it has now been recognized that they can provide us with a whole array of different benefits. In contrast, disruption of these microbial communities,…

According to Jose Castro-Perez, Ph.D., director of global markets, Health Sciences with Waters, mass spectrometry today is an underused technology in the clinical lab. But it is one that can play a significant role to help guide early treatment and preventative care, especially diseases that are significantly caused, or influenced,…

The results from three news studies, all led by investigators at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, are set to be presented at the 2017 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting. The three studies focus on liquid biopsies, an innovation which uses blood tests instead of…

Interpace Diagnostics said today that Best Med Opinion will be the exclusive provider of its molecular diagnostic tests for Israel, through a partnership that will promote Interpace’s tests to physicians and patients. The partnership covers Interpace’s three marketed tests: ThyGenX and ThyraMIR, both designed to determine the presence and absence…

Interpace Diagnostics has joined the Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) Association's Center for Clinical Effectiveness’ “Evidence Street” program, enabling the cancer-focused molecular diagnostics developer to present evidence designed to support future coverage decisions for its thyroid and pancreas diagnostic tests. Under an agreement announced Tuesday, Interpace said it will work…

Under a new research agreement, Takeda Pharmaceuticals and healthcare informatics company M2Gen will use data generated by the Oncology Research Information Exchange Network (ORIEN) to map and better understand the genetic profiles of patients with a range of cancers, all with the intent of speeding development work of new cancer…

Halozyme Therapeutics said today it will co-develop a companion diagnostic for its cancer drug candidate PEGPH20 with Ventana Medical Systems, a member of the Roche Group. The value of the collaboration was not disclosed. Ventana will ultimately commercialize the in vitro diagnostic, an assay designed to identify high levels of…

When it comes to studying and treating cancer, scientists and clinicians often think of applying two key areas of knowledge: the immune system and genomics. The combination of those fields—immunogenomics—is not quite a new field, but it is on the rise. Even in 2015, Robert Holt, PhD, scientific co-director of…

Enhertu (AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo’s trastuzumab deruxtecan) has become the first tumor-agnostic, FDA-approved, HER2-directed therapy. It is approved for adult patients with unresectable or metastatic HER2-positive (IHC 3+) solid tumors. Enhertu is an antibody drug conjugate (ADC) that consists of a HER2 monoclonal antibody attached to a number of topoisomerase…

Astellas and Poseida Therapeutics have announced a deal around Poseida’s MUC1C-ALLO1, an allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy in Phase I for multiple solid tumor indications. Astellas will invest a total of $50 million, including $25 million to acquire shares of common stock of Poseida at $3.00 per share in a private…

CD70 is highly expressed on drug-resistant cancer cells in EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) representing a promising new target for treatment of cancer cells that remain after a patient receives EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy. The new research from investigators at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer…

A ketogenic diet very low in carbohydrates can counteract the reduced blood platelet counts that often result from chemotherapy, a study in mice and men suggests. The findings, which appear in Science Translational Medicine, add to the potential therapeutic benefits of this diet, which is already being used for epilepsy…