Precision medicine company Strata Oncology announced today that Pfizer has joined the Strata Precision Indications for Approved Therapies (Strata PATH) trial, that will take a biomarker-drive approach to identifying new indications for FDA-approved targeted drugs and immunotherapies.
To kick off Strata PATH, Pfizer will provide targeted drugs in four study arms at no cost to trial participants. According to a company news release, Strata anticipates other companies will participate in the study after launch.
“The Strata PATH study is another example of our commitment to deliver the best possible treatment for each patient with cancer,” said Dan Rhodes, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO, Strata Oncology, in a press release. “We are using the latest clinical-molecular insights to devise better biomarker-guided treatment hypotheses, and then partner with biopharma to test those hypotheses in patients.”
The trial will match patients to one of a number of different investigation treatment arms by leveraging its defined biomarker profiles developed from comprehensive DNA and RNA profiling, housed in its clinical-molecular database. Strata’s database includes genomic and transcriptomic data with paired treatment outcomes that it will use to develop pan-tumor biomarker hypotheses for existing FDA-approved therapies.
Patients enrolled in Strata PATH will be those with advanced solid tumors who have exhausted standard lines of therapy, are positive for specific biomarker profiles assessed by the StrataNGS test and have not previously been treated with the identified class of therapy. StrataNGS is a comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) test targeting 429 genes performed on co-isolated RNA and DNA. According to the company, the test can simultaneously assess single-/multi-nucleotide variants (SNVs), short insertions and deletions (indels), copy number alterations (CNAs; amplifications and deep deletions), microsatellite instability (MSI) status, gene fusions, and tumor mutation burden (TMB).
“We are excited to be a part of Strata Oncology’s innovative trial to identify and test novel biomarker-guided treatment hypotheses,” said Chris Boshoff, M.D., Ph.D., chief development officer of Pfizer Oncology. “Using Strata’s data-driven approach, an opportunity to explore whether it’s possible for patients to benefit from precision therapies that are approved in other selected cancer types.”