Clinical actionability, or the determination of whether clinical action should be taken based on heterogeneous information generated by cancer genomic analysis, remains a key challenge for scientists and clinicians. Rodrigo Dienstmann, M.D., et al., writing in Molecular Oncology in 2014 (“Standardized decision support in next generation sequencing reports of somatic…

Thermo Fisher Scientific plans to buy Affymetrix for $1.3 billion, in a deal the buyer said will strengthen its position in bioscience research tools and genetic analysis. The deal, announced Friday after the close of financial markets, expands Thermo Fisher’s offerings with Affymetrix’s technologies, designed to enable parallel and multiplex…

Medivation and NanoString Technologies have entered into a collaboration worth up to $22 million with Astellas Pharma to pursue a gene expression signature algorithm from Medivation and create a companion diagnostic assay using NanoString's nCounter® Dx Analysis System. NanoString will be responsible for developing and validating the diagnostic test, seeking regulatory…

Virtual tumors—computer simulations that incorporate a patient’s genomic information—can help personalize cancer care. They have already been used to predict patient responses to drug treatments. In particular, virtual tumors have identified which patients are likely to respond to checkpoint inhibitors, drugs meant to prevent cancers from overriding host immune checkpoints.…

Berkeley Lights, which focuses on opto-nanofluidic biosystems, signed an agreement with the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai that provides early access to Berkeley Lights’ instrumentation incorporating its OptoSelect™ light technology for single-cell annotation and genomics in research applications. Scientists at Mount Sinai say are using…

Thermo Fisher Scientific said today it will partner with Novartis and Pfizer to develop and commercialize a companion diagnostic for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) across multiple drug development programs. The value of the collaboration was not disclosed. The companion diagnostic will be a multimarker, universal next-generation sequencing (NGS) oncology…

The field of liquid biopsies has exploded over the past several years with tests being conceived and validated for a large number of widely diverse cancer types. However, for a variety of reasons, liquid screens for brain tumors have been anemic—largely due to the extremely low concentrations of circulating central…

A collaborative team of researchers from the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), Mayo Clinic, and Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK) have successfully shown that circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), shed into the blood stream from cancer cells, can be used to track the progression of cancers and their response to…

Researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have harnessed the power of next-generation sequencing to analyze a large collection of leukemia tissue samples. Using whole exome sequencing (WES), the investigators screened genetic material from more than 500 samples of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)…

Those of you who have a working knowledge of applied Latin can do a quick and easy translation and deduce that pons asinorum literally means the “bridge of donkeys.” Traditionally, it refers to the proof of the isosceles triangle theorem in Euclid’s Elements, and connotes a challenge that separates the…

Working with tissue, blood, and DNA from six people with precancerous and cancerous lung lesions, scientists from Johns Hopkins scientists say they have identified what they believe are among the very earliest premalignant genetic changes that mark the potential onset of the most common and deadliest form of disease. In…

Paradigm and TME Research launched the Paradigm Neoadjuvant Breast Registry. The system will use Paradigm’s PCDx next-generation sequencing test and other advanced molecular capabilities to genomically characterize invasive breast cancer patients for targeted neoadjuvant therapies [presurgical treatment]. With more accurate accounts of individual gene variability driving disease, therapy selection will be…

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…

While the incidence of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is still relatively rare, accounting for approximately 1% of cancer deaths in the U.S., rates of occurrence are expected to rise as the largest portion of the population continues to age. Moreover, there remains a significant level of disparity in clinical outcomes,…

Sequenom agreed to a clinical research collaboration with the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center. Moores will explore the utility of Sequenom's new liquid biopsy assay to profile circulating cell-free tumor DNA in blood to enable serial monitoring and assist with therapy selection in cancer patients. This technology…