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Congenica, Gabriel Precision Oncology Partner on Clinical Interpretation for Somatic Cancer Testing

NEW YORK — Congenica said Tuesday (early Wednesday UK time) that it will collaborate with Gabriel Precision Oncology to develop a clinical interpretation software platform for somatic cancer. The deal marks Cambridge, UK-based Congenica's official expansion into somatic oncology.

The companies are building an automated system that they said will enable next-generation sequencing-based cancer molecular diagnostics from multiple genomic assays.

Gabriel, a spinout from the University of Glasgow in the UK, offers a bioinformatics pipeline of data from cancer tissue samples that feeds genomic analysis systems. Congenica plans on building a new platform incorporating this pipeline into its existing software to support rapid interpretation of somatic cancer data.

The new partners hope to integrate this platform into clinical testing to make NGS a component of routine molecular pathology testing, with the aim of increasing diagnostic efficiency and ultimately driving better patient outcomes.

"At the moment, too few patients have access to advanced molecular cancer diagnostics and, as a consequence, miss out on potential treatments and clinical trials," Andrew Biankin, a University of Glasgow professor and one of three founders of Gabriel, said in a statement.

"A distributed model where laboratories and health systems around the world can do their own tests for their own patients using a standardized and comparable analytical platform will allow more patients to access precision medicine," Biankin added. "Working together [with Congenica], we believe that our platform will enable many more cancer patients to access new treatments."

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