NEW YORK – GeneCentric Therapeutics said on Wednesday that it is entering a research collaboration with Janssen Research & Development around RNA-based drug response biomarkers for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC).
Using GeneCentric's RNA-based molecular profiling platform, the partners will identify potential signatures of disease progression and drug response to standard-of-care therapy, including the role of genomic alterations in the fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR), which are among the more common tumor mutations in these patients.
More specifically, the partners aim to deepen tumor genomic and immune microenvironment insights in NMIBC patients utilizing GeneCentric's RNA-based tumor bioinformatics technology, including the Bladder Cancer Subtype Profiler (BCSP), pan-cancer diagnostics, cancer antigen discovery, immunogenomic biomarkers, and prototype FGFR activation gene signatures, GeneCentric said.
The application of GeneCentric's RNA-based gene-expression signatures have the potential to identify relevant NMIBC subtypes and markers of response to potential therapeutic options.
"We look forward to continued deployment of our suite of RNA-based genomics analysis solutions in this collaboration as we explore the potential role of FGFR in NMIBC," Mike Milburn, President and CEO of GeneCentric Therapeutics, said in a statement. "This study comes on the heels of the retrospective analysis of mUC patients that were presented earlier this year at the ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium."
Earlier this week, GeneCentric and the Netherlands-based Erasmus University Medical Center announced that they are also collaborating on RNA-based drug response markers and novel, targeted therapies for NMIBC.