NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Geisinger Health System has struck a partnership with German personalized cancer services company Indivumed to collect and study patient samples and develop targeted treatments, the partners said today.
The agreement will enable Indivumed and Geisinger to collect samples from consenting patients who are already undergoing a surgical tumor resection. The partners will store portions of those tissue, blood, or urine samples at Geisinger via the MyCode repository, and in an Indivumed bank, where they will be analyzed.
Hamburg-based Indivumed will integrate its biobanking standard at Geisinger to create a joint platform that clinical researchers will use to analyze tumor biology. Indivumed currently maintains a biobank of tissues and annotated data from more than 20,000 patients, and it adds around 1,500 new cases per year.
"Geisinger's advanced electronic health record and clinical data repository coupled with our ability to comprehensively analyze patients' individual cancers provides a unique opportunity to quickly translate new scientific discoveries into the practice of medicine," Indivumed Founder and CEO Hartmut Juhl said in a statement.
Indivumed's standardized processes enable it to limit the cold ischemia time — the time between the removal of tissue from a body and the time it is preserved — to less than 10 minutes, which helps maintain a sample's biological integrity.
Indivumed also offers a range of research services, including cancer biomarker development, and its IndivuTest subsidiary provides tumor analysis to patients and has launched a personalized cancer treatment initiative with oncologists in Germany and the US.