NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – GE Healthcare's Clarient will commercialize Biocept's blood test for circulating tumor cells under a deal announced today.
Clarient will market and sell the OncoCEE-BR test to community hospitals, pathologists, and medical oncologists. Biocept will run the test in its CLIA laboratory and Clarient Pathology Services will analyze the results.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
OncoCEE-BR includes CTC enumeration and HER2 status of the detected CTCs by fluorescence in situ hybridization, making it the only commercially available CTC test combining enumeration and cytogenetic characterization, Biocept and Clarient said. They added that the test will be the first commercially available that includes analysis of a specific treatment-associated biomarker.
The test is anticipated to have applications in clinical settings, such as at the time of recurrence to determine if a patient's HER2 status has changed from the original diagnosis or surgery, and confirmation of HER2 status at the time of original diagnosis or surgery.
Biocept, a San Diego-based CLIA lab services firm, plans to include estrogen receptor/progesterone receptor status determination, as well as additional biomarkers on the test in the future.
According to Biocept Executive Chairman David Hale, the combination of OncoCEE-BR and Clarient's marketing and pathology capabilities will accelerate the education of doctors about the need for CTC analysis for patients with breast cancer.
"We think a blood-based CTC-directed HER2 test, which can be performed when a treatment decision arises, has high potential, and expect that it will be used to support other laboratory and clinical information to provide physicians with the most current information on a tumor to help select the most appropriate course of therapy," he said in a statement.