NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Indivumed announced today that it has partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) to help develop the organization's cancer biobank and database for use in precision medicine research.
Under the terms of the three-year deal, the collaborators will collect a variety of cancer tissue samples including ones from lung, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic tumors from volunteers in Tamil Nadu — a region with a population of roughly 78 million — and potentially the rest of India in the future. Additional terms were not disclosed.
"The collection and preservation of human tissue is vital to enable the most impactful medical research," Sundarasamy Mahalingam, a researcher at the Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences and faculty-in-charge of IITM's National Cancer Tissue Biobank, said in a statement. "The partnership with Indivumed will provide our team access to its internationally leading biobanking standards, enabling the preservation of the molecular profile of cancer patients to allow for a better understanding of the interaction between genetic changes and cell biology, an essential ingredient to developing targeted cancer therapies."
Indivumed has also signed a number of other cancer biobank agreements, including ones last month with Northwell Health and Regeneron.