NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Strata Oncology said today that it has partnered with the University of California, San Francisco to launch a new initiative called StratifyProstate, which aims to expand access to precision medicine for men with metastatic prostate cancer by accelerating clinical trial enrollment.
Under the initiative, eligible metastatic prostate cancer patients anywhere in the United States can now receive no-cost NGS testing via enrollment in the Strata Trial, an observational study sponsored by Strata to study the impact of sequencing on clinical trial enrollment.
The larger 100,000-patient Strata Trial is currently available to advanced cancer patients with a variety of solid tumors and lymphomas, and was launched in February 2017 at select clinical research sites.
StratifyProstate will help physicians who are not affiliated with these primary investigative centers to offer their patients with advanced prostate cancer access to this free tumor sequencing. The company said that it aims to recruit 10,000 men.
Strata's test, StrataNGS, is a 90-gene targeted assay that can be performed on limited archival or fresh biopsy material, and is performed in Strata’s high-throughput CLIA-certified lab in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
As part of the partnership with Strata, UCSF physicians and researchers will be tasked with driving recruitment for the initiative. They will also be able to use insights gained from the initiative to drive new advances in prostate cancer in their own research programs.
The first clinical trials that will be a part of the StratifyProstate program are the TRITON2 and TRITON3 studies of Clovis Oncology’s PARP inhibitor Rubraca (rucaparib) in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, Strata said. The company will also be considering other trials for prostate targeted therapy.