NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Geisinger Health System today announced a partnership with German firm Indivumed aimed at providing Geisinger's patients access to advanced cancer treatments and clinical trials.
Under the terms of the deal, Indivumed will have access to tissue samples from consenting Geisinger patients for molecular and biochemical profiling. Patients already undergoing a surgical tumor resection will have a portion of the tissue, blood, or urine banked by Geisinger through MyCode, a repository that currently contains 43,000 patient samples.
Another portion will be banked by Indivumed for analysis, and information gleaned from those samples will be used to help develop targeted therapies, which can then be used to treat patients, Geisinger said.
The samples being banked are in excess of what is needed to make a clinical diagnosis.
Indivumed is an integrated cancer company, and while its focus is on tissue testing, its subsidiary Inostics analyzes circulating tumor DNA in plasma to identify cancer mutations that may be most appropriate for treatment and to monitor disease.
"The goal of this collaboration is to translate genetic and proteomic data into specific knowledge about a disease that is clinically relevant and will enhance patient care," Glenn Steele, president and CEO of Geisinger, said in a statement.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.