NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Caris Life Sciences today announced the launch of a pilot program with the UK's National Health Service to offer patients with ovarian and rare gynecological cancers access to comprehensive tumor profiling.
Caris will provide about 120 women access to its Caris Molecular Intelligence tumor profiling service as part of the program. The service — which uses a variety of technologies to evaluate changes in a patient's tumor —is being made available in England for the first time.
Caris Molecular Intelligence provides oncologists clinically actionable treatment options to tailor care for each patient by correlating biomarker data generated from a tumor with biomarker/drug associations derived from scientific literature. Caris said that it also is developing blood tests based on its Carisome Top platform, a technology for the diagnosis and prognosis of cancer and other complex diseases as well as for aiding in therapy selection.
NHS is supporting the initiative through the Regional Innovation Fund, which was established to facilitate the rapid evaluation of healthcare technologies and accelerate best practice methods across the health service.
The pilot program will include patients from Leeds St. James Hospital, Bradford Royal Infirmary, Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, and Airedale General Hospital. Data generated by the project will be independently evaluated by the National Institute for Health Research Diagnostics Evidence Cooperative at Leeds, which generates evidence on clinical validity, utility, and cost-effectiveness of in vitro diagnostic medical devices for use in the NHS.
"Women with relapsed ovarian cancer and those with rarer gynecological cancers need careful decisions to be made regarding their treatment," Geoff Hall, lead cancer clinician at Leeds Teaching Hospitals and lead investigator on the pilot program, said in a statement. "The opportunity to use biomarker data from their tumors to identify the best therapy options is invaluable."
Citing statistics from Cancer Research UK, Caris said that about 7,100 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer in the U each year.