NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Drug development service company Covance today announced an alliance and service agreement with M2Gen to match patients for biomarker-driven oncology trials with the right treatment or clinical trial.
Under the terms of the deal, Covance will be the preferred provider for M2Gen for DNA/RNA sequencing, gene expression analysis, and genotyping analysis services, which will be done at Covance's genomics laboratory in Seattle.
M2Gen is a subsidiary of the Moffitt Cancer Center and its cancer-focused data warehouse and specimen biorepository connects longitudinal clinical, molecular, and specimen data from more than 95,000 patients from Moffitt and a consortium of 17 US hospitals.
Using a proprietary informatics platform to support a clinical trial matching program, M2Gen can reduce the amount of time needed to find appropriate participants for clinical trials while improving the design of biomarker-based trials, Covance said.
"M2Gen’s database is unique in the industry, with clinical data captured and maintained over the cancer patient’s lifetime," Ken Somberg, CMO and VP of Clinical development Services for Covance, said in a statement. "This alliance will help us partner with sponsors as the field of personalized medicine continues to evolve, and as we work toward a common goal of bringing new life-saving medicines to patients who need them.”
Financial and other terms were not disclosed.