NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Cartagenia announced today that it and Qiagen's bioinformatics business are part of a consortium that has received €1.4 million ($1.7 million) in funding from a European funding initiative to support the development of software tools for personalized genetic analysis of cancer variants.
The Lungcadia program will combine the technologies and expertise of Cartagenia, Qiagen, and the Institute of Pathology at Hannover Medical School and will focus on lung cancer as a disease model, but the partners aim to make the results applicable to other types of cancer. The project has received the funding from the EuroTransBio initiative, which supports biotech collaborations in Europe.
Under the collaboration, Hannover Medical School will conduct clinical and lab validations. Qiagen's bioinformatics business will create a curated database of knowledge on lung cancer variants, and Cartagenia will provide its cloud-based Bench platform to "set up robust software pipelines that help pathology labs and clinicians manage, analyze, interpret, report, and share genomic variations during the diagnostic process."
The goal of the project is to build software tools and knowledge bases that can be used to evaluate actionable findings from next-generation sequencing-based molecular tumor profiles. In turn, they hope the tools developed under the collaboration will enable personalized cancer treatments.
"With modern healthcare quickly moving toward personalized medicine, genetic analysis is playing an important role as a means of understanding a patient's unique cancer," Cartagenia CEO Herman Verrelst said in a statement. "Our software solutions can help assess the genetic profile of a patient's cancer to allow clinicians and lab directors to determine how it might respond to various treatments. We look forward to working with the consortium on the Lungcadia project."