NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Lucence Diagnostics and Singapore's Quest Laboratories have announced a new partnership under which Quest will offer blood tests developed by Lucence for cancer detection and treatment guidance to its customers in the region.
The blood tests will be based on Lucence's proprietary liquid biopsy technology. The company says it has developed assays for cancers common in Asia, like lung and colon cancer. The same tests can also read out germline cancer predisposition mutations like BRCA1 and BRCA2.
The firm has also developed technology for catching early nasopharyngeal cancers by detecting DNA from the Epstein-Barr virus — similar to the approach being commercialized by Grail for launch in Hong Kong.
Grail announced its plans for that test earlier this year after a merger with Cirina, a company formed from research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong led by Dennis Lo.
Lucence describes its nasopharyngeal cancer test as deriving from patented approaches developed from research it first published in 2016.