NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Eli Lilly has signed a three-year collaboration with GE Healthcare and GE Global Research to develop in vitro diagnostics to predict the response of patients to targeted cancer therapies, the companies said today.
The collaboration covers targeted cancer therapeutics under development at Lilly and GE’s multiplexed tissue-based assays and image analysis tools.
The partners plan to discover protein and gene signatures that will predict the likelihood that a given therapy will be effective in treating certain cancers. These signatures could then be used to pre-select patients who are good candidates for the targeted therapy, the companies said.
The collaboration “complements Lilly's research and development strategy of tailored therapeutics, or in other words, finding the right dose of the right medication at the right time for patients,” said Richard Gaynor, vice president of cancer research and global oncology for Eli Lilly.
Gaynor said that Lilly is hoping to identify biomarkers for two of its targeted cancer therapeutic agents “by examining patient tissues in order to determine which patients are most likely to respond to the medications and, just as importantly, which are not."
Under the terms of the agreement, GE will have access to clinical tissue samples from unidentified patients enrolled in Lilly's clinical trials and Lilly will have access to GE's tissue-based image analysis technology and molecular reagents.
Further terms of the agreement were not disclosed.