NEW YORK – Centogene said this week that it has extended its partnership with Takeda, which was originally established in 2015 with Shire Pharmaceuticals (hence acquired by Takeda) and was extended once already last year. Under the one-year contract extension, the Rostock, Germany-based rare disease company will continue to provide fee-for-service genetic diagnostic testing for patients with lysosomal storage disorders such as Fabry disease, Gaucher disease, and Hunter syndrome.
DermTech said this week that it signed a contract that has made its Melanoma Test available to about 3.8 million Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina members effective March 15, expanding the test’s availability to about 126 million people in the US. The La Jolla, California-based skin cancer diagnostics company said its test platform detects melanoma with a greater than 99 percent negative predictive value using an RT-PCR assay to identify expression of LINC00518 and PRAME genes and an add-on assay to identify the presence of TERT promoter mutations.
Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami said this week that it has launched a clinic to assist pediatric patients with rare or undiagnosed diseases and their families. The Undiagnosed Diseases Clinic, occurring monthly, offers eligible patients genetic testing, including whole-genome sequencing, as well as metabolomic testing. Eligible patients usually show several phenotypes and do not have a diagnosis yet. If a diagnosis is determined, children are referred to specialists for future treatment opportunities.
The Scottish Medicines Consortium this week cleared Daiichi Sankyo and AstraZeneca's Enhertu (trastuzumab deruxtecan) for restricted use within the National Health Service (NHS) Scotland as a treatment for patients with unresectable or metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer who have received one prior anti-HER2-based regimen. In December, the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended Enhertu for metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer patients after one prior anti-HER2 regimen and made the drug available through a managed access scheme. Enhertu is also available in the UK for metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer patients who have received two or more prior anti-HER2 therapies.
Freenome said this week that the Institute for Population and Precision Health at the University of Chicago has joined as a study partner for its Vallania multi-cancer early detection study, which began enrollment in 2022. The company's multiomics platform combines tumor and non-tumor signals with machine learning to detect cancers using a standard blood draw and is currently being validated for detection of colorectal cancer. In the Vallania study, Freenome is now refining the approach across multiple tumor types, enrolling patients at more than 100 sites across the United States.
Affini-T Therapeutics and Memorial Sloan Kettering said this week that they have inked a multiyear deal to develop new T-cell therapies targeting oncogene driver mutations, including KRAS mutations, to treat patients with solid tumors. As part of the sponsored research agreement, MSK's Christopher Klebanoff will join Affini-T as a scientific cofounder and adviser.
Ginkgo Bioworks said this week that it is collaborating with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation on the development of chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) for use in T-cell therapies. University of Wisconsin-Madison professors Krishanu Saha and Christian Captini will use Ginkgo's pooled CAR screening platform to design and characterize new intracellular signaling domains that prevent the exhaustion of T cells in a solid tumor context. The partners will validate new designs in high-throughput in vitro screens and in vivo mouse models. Ginkgo and WARF also plan to collaborate on the development of a pooled in vivo screening platform to advance novel CAR discovery.
Crescendo Biologics and Angle said this week that they have inked a deal to use Angle's immunofluorescence-based Portrait Flex assay to test patient samples in an expansion cohort of the ongoing Phase I POTENTIA trial of Cresendo's bispecific CB307 for prostate-specific membrane antigen-positive solid tumors. The partnered firms will use the assay to detect circulating tumor cells and cells undergoing epithelial-mesenchymal transition.
In Brief This Week is a selection of news items that may be of interest to our readers but had not previously appeared in Precision Medicine Online.