NEW YORK – Sophia Genetics and Realm IDx said Monday that they have signed a letter of intent to codevelop novel genomic applications and commercialize multimodal applications to widen the use of next-generation sequencing for cancer care. The firms expect this letter of intent to result in a full-blown collaboration in the future.
Alisa Viejo, California-based Realm IDx, formerly known as Konica Minolta Precision Medicine, provides insights for the prediction, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. Through this planned collaboration, Realm IDx and Sophia Genetics will seek to enrich and expand the scale of analysis of NGS assays.
The companies said that they intend to rely on TumorNEXT-HRD, which looks for somatic tumor mutations as well as germline mutations in the blood. TumorNEXT-HRD is a product of Ambry Genetics, a subsidiary of RealmIDx.
The potential partners also expect to combine Ambry's variant assessment database with Sophia's flagship DDM (Data-Driven Medicine) analytics platform to improve detection of homologous recombination deficiency. They added that they are considering using Ambry's laboratory for sequencing.
"Our goal is to enable healthcare professionals to leverage insights across multiple data sources with the aim to provide better diagnosis and treatments for the benefit of patients around the world," Jurgi Camblong, cofounder and CEO of Saint-Sulpice, Switzerland-based Sophia Genetics, said in a statement.
"The heart of our work is the ability to combine patient data from multiple sources to improve treatment decisions and discover new medicines," said Jonathan Usuka, chief strategy and informatics officer of REALM IDx. "With the synergies we hope to realize from collaborating with Sophia Genetics, we will continue to enhance our ability to address some of healthcare's most challenging diseases."