NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Roche said today that it has acquired privately held CAPP Medical in order to develop technology for screening and monitoring cancer from circulating tumor DNA in blood.
CAPP Medical, based in Palo Alto, Calif., was founded in October 2013 by Stanford University oncologists and "industry veterans," according to Roche. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed in the announcement.
The firm has developed a technology to analyze ctDNA from blood using next-generation sequencing that can detect multiple mutations with a single assay, which could be helpful to select cancer therapies and monitor tumor response and resistance.
"Roche believes focused and high-quality next-generation sequencing assays using simple blood draws have the potential to significantly advance the time of cancer diagnosis and change routine cancer diagnostic monitoring, and may be highly cost effective compared to today's current standard of using PET and CT imaging to monitor tumor progression," Roland Diggelmann, COO of Roche Diagnostics, said in a statement.
CAPP Medical's technology could benefit diagnostic tests for patients and provide support for clinical trials for oncology drug development, he added.