NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Quintiles and Population Genetics Technologies today announced a partnership aimed at incorporating genomic testing into mainstream drug development.
The firms will jointly identify opportunities to apply large-scale genomic analyses to test clinical hypotheses and correlate biomarkers of disease prognosis and drug responsiveness. The non-exclusive collaboration will utilize PGT's technology for processing hundreds of genomes simultaneously in a single assay, while retaining the ability to identify each individual genome during post-sequencing data analysis, they said.
"The combination of Quintiles and PGT's capabilities can, we believe, increase the probability of success in clinical trials, reduce trial enrollment required to achieve statistical significance, and diminish the costs and/or time required to bring a product to market – all while improving product differentiation," M. King Jolly, SVP of Quintiles Innovation, said in a statement.
The first project the partners are working on is a renal cancer clinical trial to identify genetic markers of adverse events and efficacy.
PGT is based in Cambridge, UK, and was co-founded Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner.
Research Triangle Park, NC-based Quintiles is a biopharmaceutical services company known for its efforts as a clinical research organization. It noted that its Translational R&D Oncology group offers genomic technologies for biomarker discovery.
Financial and further terms of the alliance were not disclosed.