precision medicine

Viewing posts tagged precision medicine

09 Jun 2017

From Point of Care to Point of Clinic

By Jay Goth

Within developed world healthcare systems, there is a growing awareness that the turnaround time of the central laboratory cannot always provide the speed to enable effective and economic decision making.

See full article


Point-of-clinic diagnostic services bring analytical testing from the laboratory to the clinic with the aim of providing prompt, high-quality results.
This is an exciting area of technology that has the potential to impact the lives of many patients and play a significant role in supporting sustainable healthcare systems. Stratified medicine and more individualized approaches to care will become a focus moving forward, and diagnostics will aid the selection of the most effective medicines.

“This facilitates early diagnosis and treatment of health conditions…”

Check the full article at Qmed here.

06 Apr 2017

The Cancer Ecosystem

By Jay Goth

Cancer is increasingly being viewed as an ecosystem, a community in which tumor cells cooperate with other tumor cells and host cells in their microenvironment. As conditions change, the ecosystem evolves and adapts to ensure the survival and growth of cancer.

Successful treatment and prevention of cancer require an ecosystem, too—a coordinated unit of researchers, patients, health care professionals, health care systems, regulatory agencies, government, and industry. How can these partners work together as one interconnected community?

Sandra J. Horning, the Chief Medical Officer and Global Head of Product Development at Genentech and Roche has some ideas. Check them out here.

“Importantly, basic scientific research that unlocks the mysteries of cancer and discovers targets for therapy, early detection, and prevention is the core of a healthy ecosystem to tame the disease.”

03 Apr 2017

Cancer subtypes could be distinguished using metabolomic analysis

By Jay Goth

The emerging field of metabolomics has the potential to contribute significantly to biomarker discovery and cancer. While other techniques, such as DNA sequencing, have led to significant advances in precision oncology, metabolomics has yet to make its mark on the field.

New methods of using metabolomics as a tool for clinical cancer research and care were presented at the 2nd Annual Biomarker Conference by CureMatch, developer of a decision support platform for combination therapy in cancer.
See the full story at Oncology Central.

27 Mar 2017

Researchers Link Noncoding Genetic Variants to Neurodevelopmental Disorders

By Jay Goth

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics studying the DNA of children with severe language problems say they have identified genetic variants in the 3′ untranslated region genome (3’UTRome), which is part of the noncoding part of the genome.

“Our study shows that the identification and testing of noncoding variants will foster our understanding of the genetic causes of neurodevelopmental disorders, which is crucial in the long-term for the design of new and effective therapeutics.”

— Sonja Vernes, Ph.D.
Get the full story at Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News

New Article in GEN

23 Mar 2017

Atomic Force Microscopy – Say What??

By Jay Goth

Knowledge of protein folding is important because proteins must assume the correct three-dimensional structure to function properly. Misfolding may inactivate a protein or make it toxic. A new approach has allowed JILA scientists to capture the protein’s folding steps at microsecond resolution.

By showing how the folding of membrane proteins can be studied in more detail, JILA scientists have shown how researchers may better understand previously obscure biophysical processes related to diseases such as neurodegeneration and cancer.

Get the full story at Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

New Article in GEN

“The increased complexity was stunning. Better instruments revealed all sorts of hidden dynamics that were obscured over the last 17 years when using conventional technology.”

— Tom Perkins, Ph.D., the leader of the team at JILA

17 Mar 2017

New Report on Personalized Medicine Released

By Jay Goth

For more than two millennia, medicine has maintained its aspiration of being personalized. In ancient times, Hippocrates combined an assessment of the four humors — blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile — to determine the best course of treatment for each patient. Today, the sequence of the four chemical building blocks that comprise DNA, coupled with telltale proteins in the blood, enable more accurate medical predictions.

A new report from the Personalized Medicine Coalition describes the current state of personalized medicine and the opportunities in the future.

Get the full report here.

“The power in tailored therapeutics is for us to say more clearly to payers, providers, and patients: ‘this drug is not for everyone, but it is for you.’ That is exceedingly powerful.”

–John C. Lechleiter, Ph.D. former Chairman, President, and CEO, Eli Lilly and Company

07 Mar 2017

GRAIL Raises $900M to Develop Early Blood Tests for Cancer

By Jay Goth

GRAIL is combining what it calls high-intensity (ultrabroad and ultradeep) sequencing and population-based clinical trials to characterize circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in healthy individuals and cancer patients. The ultimate aim is to develop cancer diagnostics that can detect tumors early enough to cure the disease. See the full story at Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

New Article in GEN


This is a core focus for all precision medicine oncology approaches, including ours. We believe that a multi-omic focus that goes beyond circulating tumor cells can have major advantages.

13 Feb 2017

Liquid Biopsy Boom

By Jay Goth

If liquid biopsies can prove effective as a diagnostic tool in the pre- and post-cancer settings, some in the industry predict the market’s value could balloon to anywhere from $20 billion to over $100 billion, according to a recent article BioPharma Dive.

Forentis finds this interesting, as much of our focus is on funding the research that can bring these types of diagnostics to market. Advancing precision medicine by applying new technologies like liquid biopsies is in our DNA. Liquid biopsies and clinical trial enrichment are critical to developing the precision treatments and companion diagnostics that will make precision medicine a reality.

“Another use of liquid biopsies is in clinical trials. As targeted therapies proliferate, pharma companies need to cast a wide net in order to enroll patients who match the specific criteria of drug studies. Using liquid biopsies to screen patients could greatly accelerate enrollment as well as lowering costs.”

– BioPharma Dive

What is exciting to us is that while the industry is focused on circulating tumor cell biomarkers, we are going deeper into the human biology. If you are interested in finding out more about how we are accessing multi-omic biomarkers – give us a call!

25 Jan 2017

Liquid Biopsy Market Set to Explode

By Jay Goth

The Global Liquid Biopsy Market has been assessed as a swiftly growing market and it is expected that the market will reach high growth figures and boom in the coming future, according to a report from Market Research Future.

According to the report, there is enormous demand for liquid biopsy in the research laboratories of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as drug development is one of the major applications of the technology.
There has been a tremendous growth in the prevalence of cancer disease and the global population getting diagnosed with cancer. The firm estimates that the Liquid Biopsy market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21.6% from 2016 to 2022.

18 Jan 2017

Big Data: Precision Medicine Research in the Million-Genome Era

By Jay Goth

A major challenge for large-scale precision medicine research is in harmonizing data from different sources. As a simple example, researchers can use a whole genome sequence from a patient with a rare disease to find a list of potentially causal variants for further investigation. Moreover, these variants can be filtered effectively when combined with genomic data from 100,000 people without the disease. Bringing in the additional 100,000 samples can be nontrivial, both because of the size of the data involved and because of different methods of data collection among studies. Read the entire article at GEN

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