Biomarker Commons

Adaptive Biotechnologies recently announced that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Bristol-Myers Squibb for the discovery of immunological biomarkers in oncology.

Exosome Diagnostics, a leading developer of biofluid-based molecular diagnostic products for use in personalized medicine research and clinical diagnostics, recently presented data at the American Urological Association Annual Meeting in San Diego demonstrating the performance of urine exosome technology in accurately predicting the outcome of a prostate biopsy.

"Current wisdom says that cells are closed entities that communicate through the secretion of soluble signalling molecules. Recent findings indicate that cells can exchange more complex information – whole packages of genetic material and signalling proteins. This is an entirely new conception of how cells communicate", says Dr Mattias Belting, Professor of Oncology at Lund University and senior consultant in oncology at Skåne University Hospital, Lund, Sweden.

Oxford Cancer Biomarkers Ltd (OCB), the UK-based company developing tests that allow medicines to be personalised for the benefit of the cancer patient, recently announced an agreement with AstraZeneca for biomarker discovery, with the potential for further collaboration on validation and development of resulting biomarkers.

OCB will work with an undisclosed AstraZeneca cancer drug to discover biomarkers that have the potential to predict responders and non-responders to the drug. Under the agreement, AstraZeneca has been granted an option to license biomarkers from the programme.

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (BIPI) today announced results of two surveys that explored how pulmonologists and pathologists are incorporating biomarker testing into the care of patients with lung cancer. The results point to an increased role of these physicians in biomarker testing as well as greater multidisciplinary collaboration. However, they also reveal that an opportunity exists to improve how soon these tests are requested and to identify challenges with testing, including collecting a sufficient amount and quality of lung tissue.

bioTheranostics’ CancerTYPE® ID molecular cancer classifier demonstrated superior accuracy compared with immunohistochemistry (IHC) in identifying the primary site in difficult-to-diagnose metastatic tumors. The comparative effectiveness study, which was published recently in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, is the first comprehensive investigation to directly compare the diagnostic accuracy of the two tumor classification techniques.