This webinar will cover the Cancer Avatar Project at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute (CPMCRI), and Swift Biosciences’ technology that helps to overcome the complexity of tumor profiling, namely the company’s Accel-Amplicon NGS sequencing workflow.

In the first part of this webinar, CPMCRI's Dr. Pierre-Yves Desprez will discuss the Cancer Avatar Project, a multimodal approach that includes living biology, genomics, high-throughput pharmacologic screening, and informatics to design highly individualized treatment options for fast-growing solid tumors (8 different types of cancer) in patients who have exhausted standard-of-care options.

His team has optimized a method for sequencing circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) obtained from patients' blood. Mutations identified in ctDNA can reflect alterations found in the primary tumor. Dr. Desprez will share DNA sequencing results from more than 100 matched tissue and ctDNA samples to reveal driver mutations. Additionally, he will outline his lab’s strategy to analyze mutational profiles of longitudinal blood biopsies to monitor each patient’s response to treatment and/or evolution toward resistance in real time and in a non-invasive manner. This information is anticipated to be instrumental in designing treatment strategies in patients with recurrent or progressive disease.

In the second part of this webinar, Dr. Drew McUsic of Swift Biosciences will give a brief overview of Swift’s Accel-Amplicon NGS sequencing workflow and the new customizable cancer panels for targeted sequencing studies, including Swift’s Accel-Amplicon 56G Oncology Panel v2 kit for target amplification.