NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Caris Life Sciences and Foundation Medicine announced that they have each signed agreements to provide tumor profiling services to the National Cancer Institute as part of a large-scale clinical trial evaluating various targeted cancer therapies.
Called NCI-Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice — or NCI-MATCH — the Phase II study was launched in mid-2015 to test targeted therapies against specific tumor alterations across tumor types. It is being overseen by the NCI and and the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group-American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ECOG-ACRIN), and expects to sequence the tumors of 6,000 patients from more than 1,100 clinical sites.
Under the terms of the deals, Caris will use its Caris Molecular Intelligence tumor profiling service and Foundation will use its FoundationOne and FoundationOne Heme assays to analyze samples provided by physicians participating in the study. When the companies identify a patient with genetic abnormalities that could make them eligible for an NCI-MATCH treatment, they will notify the physician.
Caris said that it will also facilitate communication with study investigators through its MI Trials outreach program, and participate in a concordance analysis to evaluate next-generation sequencing results for identified trial patients with ECOG-ACRIN and NCI laboratories. Foundation said it will use its SmartTrials outreach service to contact treating physicians.
The companies aim to help the NCI identify a larger number of patients for inclusion in the NCI-MATCH study.
As reported earlier this week, Caris and Foundation are also providing tumor profiling services to the American Society of Clinical Oncology in support of its Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry study, which is investigating the safety and efficacy of commercially available cancer drugs when they are given off label and based on the genomic characteristics of patients' tumors.