NEW YORK – Roche companies Flatiron Health, Foundation Medicine, and Genentech announced on Monday the launch of their Prospective Clinico-Genomic (PGC) study, a collaborative effort meant to streamline clinical trials in advanced lung cancer and to identify genomic features to predict treatment response or resistance.
The PGC study is funded and sponsored by Genentech and currently involves 14 academic and community oncology centers, with additional research sites planned. The feasibility study will pilot Flatiron Health's technology platform to prospectively collect real-world data from the roughly 1,000 patients enrolled. Researchers will then link this real-world data with genomic information gleaned from serial liquid biopsies using Foundation Medicine's assay designed to assess genomic changes over the course of a patient's treatment.
The real-world data and liquid biopsy results will be combined with clinical, imaging, and outcomes data, ultimately creating a comprehensive platform to accelerate lung cancer research and simplify and streamline the way that clinical research is performed, the partners said. The PGC study officially launched in December 2019, and an update on its progress will be shared through a Trials in Progress presentation during the American Society of Clinical Oncology's 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting.
"Using new platforms to accelerate the development and delivery of the best possible medicines for every type of patient is central to our vision for personalized healthcare," Mark Lee, Genentech's head of personalized healthcare and product development, said in a statement. "The PCG Study represents an important step toward the next iteration of the clinical research ecosystem, opening up opportunities to extend clinical trials into the real-world setting to more investigators and more patients than ever before."