NEW YORK – Kinnate Biopharma said on Monday that it has partnered with Guardant Health for a study characterizing the prevalence of BRAF Class I, II, and III alterations in patients with advanced solid tumors.
The study, which has already produced initial data, aims to support the development of BRAF-targeting drugs.
The two companies have partnered to collect and analyze real-world data from the GuardantInform database, which includes clinical and genomic data from more than 175,000 patients representing multiple tumor types, demographics, and treatment settings, all tested with Guardant's comprehensive liquid biopsy assay.
Kinnate is studying patients' real-world clinical outcomes to explore links between BRAF alteration class, treatment type, and survival, as it seeks to advance new small molecule kinase inhibitors.
According to Kinnate, although the outcome analysis is ongoing, preliminary findings indicate that about half of the 6,000 patients with BRAF alteration-positive cancers harbored Class II and III alterations.
Prevalence of BRAF Class II and III alterations in those patients ranged from 20 percent in melanoma to about 65 percent in non-small cell lung cancer. They were also detected at substantial rates in other common and rare tumor types such as prostate cancer, breast cancer, duodenal adenocarcinoma, renal pelvis urothelial carcinoma, and cholangiocarcinoma.
"Currently, patients with Class II and III BRAF alterations have no available targeted therapies and represent a significant and potentially greater unmet clinical need than previously understood," Richard Williams, Kinnate's chief medical officer, said in a statement.
"GuardantInform has provided valuable insights … that will help us to guide the development of our lead BRAF candidate," he added.
Financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.