NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Washington University in St. Louis has partnered with ArcherDX to assess minimum residual disease in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia patients.
Researchers plan to use ArcherDX's sequencing technology to analyze 870 patients who are part of a Children's Oncology Group clinical trial that is analyzing different treatment regimens for pediatric AML patients with Down syndrome based on how they respond to an initial induction therapy.
The team plans to use ArcherDX's VariantPlex panel, which makes use of the company's proprietary anchored multiplex PCR chemistry and error correction, to sequence patients at both diagnosis and relapse.
"Evidence suggests that some patients harbor rare sub-clones of cancer cells at the time of diagnosis that can go undetected by conventional techniques and remain present at relapse," Todd Druley, principal investigator and associate professor of pediatrics and genetics at Washington University School of Medicine, said in a statement.
Erin Crowgey, associate director of bioinformatics at the Nemours Children's Health System, who is working with Druley's team, said that the researchers have been working with ArcherDX to "push the limits of NGS down to one in 10,000 cells, which is the resolution needed for MRD-type studies."