NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – ArcherDx said today that it has entered a research collaboration agreement with the University College London (UCL) and the Francis Crick Institute on lung cancer research.
As part of the agreement, the partners will apply ArcherDx's anchored multiplex PCR (AMP) technology to detect disease recurrence in lung cancer patients from cell-free circulating tumor DNA as part of the UCL-sponsored Tracking Lung Cancer Evolution Through Treatment (TRACERx) study.
Working with ArcherDx, UCL and TRACERx researchers plan to expand on initial findings from a 2017 clinical study by developing patient-specific assays based on AMP technology, which they will use to find low-volume minimal residual disease and characterize the phylogenetic and neoantigen landscape of relapsing lung cancer.
"As we expand upon and progress our research, exploring lung cancer in an unprecedented level of detail, this collaboration with ArcherDx will help towards achieving our goal of a more personalized approach to developing cancer treatments," TRACERx lead researcher Charles Swanton said in a statement.
Financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.
"This collaboration aligns closely with ArcherDx's mission to expand access and adoption of personalized medicine in oncology," ArcherDx executive VP Josh Stahl said in a statement. "We've spent the last five years developing and continually evolving our technology for complex and groundbreaking applications like those being studied in the TRACERx study."