NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Genomic Health announced this week that the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) has incorporated the Oncotype DX test in its recently published Eighth Edition AJCC Cancer Staging Manual.
The AJCC updated criteria noted that the Oncotype DX is the only multi-gene test with Level I evidence to determine formal staging of breast cancer patients, based on clinical evidence in more than 63,000 patients. Effective January 2018, the new AJCC Prognostic Stage Groups will add the Oncotype DX Breast Recurrence Score, hormonal status, and HER2 status to nodal status, tumor size, and tumor grade for staging breast cancer, Genomic Health said.
NRGene and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center said this week that they have assembled a W22 maize reference genome. The partners used the DeNovoMagic 3.0 software for the assembly. This version of W22 has reached a scaffold N50 of 35.5 megabytes with less than 2 percent unfilled sequence gaps.
Viatar CTC Solutions announced this week that it plans to voluntarily delist from the OTCQB market. The company will pursue private financing instead. The company said it "took these actions because of the abysmal liquidity and valuation of its stock on the OTCQB." Approximately 300,000 of its shares have traded at prices from $1.10 per share to $.30 per share in the past 18 months. The company raised $6.5 million of capital at a weighted average price of $1.80 per share during the same time period.
Population Diagnostics said this week that it is changing its corporate name to Population Bio, effective immediately. The name change reflects the company's commitment to precision medicine, it said.
Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg (IBBL) said this week that, after conducting an audit, the Office Luxembourgeois d’Accréditation et de Surveillance confirmed the biobank's ISO 17025 certification, and expanded its scope to four additional testing methods: DNA cross-linking assessment, long-range PCR, human sCD40L quantification in serum, and 16S rRNA gene sequencing. IBBL said it is the first biobank in the world accredited for 16S rRNA gene sequencing.
In Brief This Week is a selection of news items that may be of interest to our readers but had not previously appeared on the GenomeWeb site.