NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Qiagen announced today that it has partnered with Mirati Therapeutics to co-develop and commercialize a companion diagnostic for Mirati's glesatinib, a targeted therapy under development for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer.
The diagnostic is intended to guide physicians in whether or not to prescribe glesatinib to NSCLC patients by detecting RNA biomarkers produced by exon 14 skipping mutations of the MET gene.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"We are pleased to partner with Mirati to commercialize a standardized companion diagnostic paired with glesatinib, a compound now in Phase II trials for NSCLC patients with cancer-driving MET alterations," said Qiagen CEO Peer Schatz in a statement. "Delivering insights on these clinically actionable variants holds potential to significantly improve clinical outcomes. This companion diagnostic for glesatinib is the initial effort under a master collaboration agreement, and we continue to discuss potential future projects across various sample types and platforms, such as PCR and NGS, to further expand targeted diagnostic capabilities in this arena."
Mirati signed similar collaboration deals with Foundation Medicine and Guardant Health in December to use their assays to select lung cancer patients for the glesatinib Phase II clinical trial. At that time, the company said those collaborations could lead to the possible development of the technologies — Guardant's ctDNA sequencing test Guardant360 and Foundation Medicine's tumor-tissue sequencing assay Foundation One — as companion diagnostics to the drug.