NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Population Genetics Technologies (PGT) will use funding from the UK's National Institute for Health Research to study the links between rare sequence variants and patient response for a range of chemotherapy agents, the company said today.
Based at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge, UK, the company has developed technologies that it said will "dramatically reduce" the cost of large-scale population studies on next-generation sequencing platforms and will allow for the detection and characterization of rare allelic variations linked to diseases.
The firm plans to use the funding to assess the links between rare variants and chemotherapy drug response in 1,000 patient genomes.
PGT, which was founded in 2005, received the support under the i4i Programme, which invests in promising healthcare technologies.
"PGT intends to use this study to demonstrate the value of its approach in identifying, before treatment, which patients in any given population are likely to respond favorably or adversely to a given drug regime," PGT CEO and President Mel Kronick said in a statement.
Specific financial terms of the grant were not released.