NEW YORK – A partnership including BC Platforms, Euformatics, and Oncompass Medicine has won a contract to develop standardized next-generation sequencing workflows in oncology for a group of seven Central European hospitals, BC Platforms said Wednesday.
The companies will also integrate, standardize, and analyze data from cancer gene testing, pharmacogenomics testing, and medication databases to support clinical decision support at the bedside.
The contract, the size of which was not immediately available, is partially funded under an €8 million ($8.4 million) European Union Horizon 2020 project called Instand-NGS4P to improve how cancer patients might benefit from NGS. Instand-NGS4P began in 2020 and will run through May 2025. BC Platforms, Euformatics, and Oncompass Medicine will begin working immediately and must deliver preliminary results by August, at which point the hospital consortium will evaluate the vendors and decide whether they should continue to a second phase.
The partners said they bring together experience and expertise in genomic data management, variant interpretation, NGS data quality control, and precision oncology.
"Driven by patient and clinical needs, innovative NGS workflows from sample pre-analytics to medical decision-making will be developed in the program," Kurt Zatloukal, professor of pathology at Medical University Graz, said in a statement. The Austrian university leads the hospital coalition, which also includes the University of Florence and the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy, Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel and St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute in Germany, and Centre Léon Bérard in France.
“Our breakthrough AI-powered oncology software can help oncologists find the right targeted therapy for every cancer patient based on the whole complex molecular profile of their tumor," added Oncompass Medicine Founder and CEO Istvan Petak. "This being the last step in the NGS workflow, we wanted to partner with BC Platforms and Euformatics to cover the full post-sequencing bioinformatics and reporting with an integrated end-to-end solution that will be easy for the hospitals to deploy after the project is completed."