Scientists in Copenhagen have developed a new tool for diagnosing and monitoring a wide variety of cancers, which uses a malaria protein known rVAR2 to grab hold of and remove circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood samples. The researchers, headed by Mette Ø. Agerbæk, Ph.D., and Ali Salanti, Ph.D., at…

MolecularMD announced it has entered an exclusive agreement with clinical oncology laboratory Genoptix to market and perform the testing services for the MRDx BCR-ABL test, a companion diagnostic that identifies Ph+CML patients in the chronic phase taking Tasigna who are eligible for initiation and monitoring of treatment-free remission (TFR). TFR…

Even standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology should, in principle, boost weak mutant signals so that they may emerge from all the genomic noise emitted by wild-type sequences. Yet standard PCR, for all its sequence-amplifying and signal-boosting powers, is still a qualitative technique.  That is, it can indicate only if…

Cancer metastasis causes 90% of all cancer-related deaths. Scientists agree that the metastases occur when cancer cells are shed from the primary tumor, carried by the peripheral blood, and deposited at a distal site to create a new colony. An ability to etect circulating tumor cells (CTCs) or cell-free cancer…

Inivata and Thermo Fisher Scientific are collaborating with Genomics England to assess the quality of blood plasma samples and explore the potential of liquid biopsy to improve disease management and patient outcomes. Thermo Fisher Scientific and Inivata will analyze about 500 plasma samples donated by participants in Genomics England’s 100,000…

Novartis’ Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) will be the first chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) cancer immunotherapy to reach the U.S. market following FDA approval yesterday. Kymriah, previously known as CTL019, is indicated for the treatment of second or later relapsed or refractory (r/r) patients up to age 25 with B-cell acute lymphoblastic…

Conducted repeatedly, a blood test capable of profiling circulating tumor DNA can track genetic changes that occur over time, picking up signs that a treated cancer—in this case, breast cancer—is about to return. The blood test, a so-called liquid biopsy, detects mutations in DNA shed by cancer cells, and it…

Research led by scientists from Cologne University, Amsterdam UMC and Copenhagen University has shown that a chemo free drug combination therapy can yield better results as well as fewer side effects for young people suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). CLL is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow…

Sponsored content brought to you by When it comes to developing new cancer therapeutics, time is of the essence—for the patients that need treatments most, every day counts. Traditional benchmarks for evaluating a treatment’s effectiveness in clinical trials, such as five-year survival rates, deliver prognostic insights on a slower timeline…

Adding the immunotherapy blinatumomab after an initial round of consolidation chemotherapy in patients with good prognosis with B lineage acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) kept most patients in remission and improved survival. Results of the randomized Phase III study showed that after three-and-a-half years of follow up, 83% of patients who…

Guardant Health will launch its first blood-based liquid biopsy for residual disease detection and recurrence monitoring next month—while later this year it will commercialize its first next-generation tissue-based test, as the diagnostics developer expands its focus beyond late-stage cancer and blood-based tests. The new liquid biopsy, Guardant Reveal, is a…

Progress Is Being Made Toward Using Big Data for Genomics-Guided Precision Medicine Precision medicine springs from a paradox. On the one hand, researchers in the field seek to characterize ever smaller populations of patients—to the level of a single person (the so-called n-of-one). In that sense, “precision medicine is almost…

Extending a collaboration launched last year, Celsee said it will commercialize a gene panel and several tests incorporating the single-cell diagnostic technology platform of IncellDx. Under a co-marketing and development agreement whose value was not disclosed, Celsee and IncellDx plan to commercialize: A 20-marker Cell-by-Cell Lung Cancer Genomics and Proteomics…

The enormous diagnostic potential to dramatically change clinical medicine that is contained within the technique known as liquid biopsy has ignited a flurry of ideas and designs within the molecular diagnostic field. The ability to take a minimally invasive biological sample from a patient and diagnose or track disease could…