NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Moffitt Cancer Center and diagnostics service firm CvergenX announced today an exclusive worldwide licensing agreement covering CvergenX's radiation therapy technology platform called InterveneXRT.
In a statement, Moffitt said that its researchers have used gene expression analysis and system biology "to create a radio-sensitivity classification index for individual tumors."
While genomic analysis has been applied to the development of diagnostic tools to guide chemotherapy, "this is the first time that the field has expanded to radiation therapy," Javier Torres-Roca, a radiation oncologist who co-founded CvergenX with Steven Eschrich, said in the statement. Both are faculty members at Moffitt.
Radiation therapy is prescribed for more than 60 percent of all cancer patients, more than any single chemotherapy agent, but "there has been an unmet need to develop biomarkers that predict response to radiation therapy," added Jarett Rieger, director of the Office of Technology Management and Commercialization at Moffitt.
The InterveneXRT platform is the result of seven years and $2 million of research, mostly from the National Cancer Institute. It currently is undergoing clinical studies for further validation and optimization.
Under the agreement, CvergenX will pay Moffitt when certain various commercialization milestones are achieved, and royalty payments based on the sales of testing services and licensed products.
According to Mary Del Brady, chairperson and CEO of CvergenX, the intellectual property is fully protected and the firm is "poised to proceed with the commercialization of InterveneXRT, including studies across multiple disease sites, and later, the opening of an independent advanced diagnostics laboratory."