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Personalis MRD Assays to Support UK's TRACERx ctDNA Monitoring Study

NEW YORK – Cancer Research UK, University College London, and the Francis Crick Institute said Wednesday that they have adopted Personalis' NeXT Personal, a personalized residual disease detection platform, in their TRACERx study.

Already ongoing for several years, TRACERx has been a notable venue for discovery and validation of post-surgery liquid biopsy cancer monitoring techniques, tracking early-stage non-small cell lung cancer patients after curative-intent surgery.

Moving forward, the UK institutions said they will be using Personalis' assay platform as they begin taking "practical steps to make precision medicine for lung cancer patients a reality."

Investigators will create personalized assays, informed by upfront whole-genome sequencing of tumor tissue, to identify and track minimal residual disease, identify relapse earlier than possible with current imaging technologies, and study disease evolution.

"Thanks to the TRACERx study, we've already seen the importance of ctDNA in predicting cancer recurrence in an initial cohort of patients," the study's principal investigator Charles Swanton, who is affiliated with all three of the institutions, said in a statement. "Personalis' highly sensitive [test] will allow us to achieve a rich understanding of the complex tumor ecosystem, including by tracking clinically relevant ctDNA variants at recurrence, and ultimately allowing us to make more informed decisions about patient care," he added.

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