NEW YORK (360Dx) – Almac Diagnostics has announced that the European Organization for the Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) has tapped the company to establish molecular profiles of cancer patient samples.
The EORTC, with help from Almac Diagnostics laboratory services, seeks to streamline patient inclusion in clinical trials of molecularly targeted treatments, and to standardize next-generation sequencing and gene expression analysis.
Patient samples will be sourced from EORTC clinical trials and will include samples from the Screening Patients for Effective Clinical Trial Access (SPECTA), a pan-European Cancer network. Almac will receive and process patient samples across multiple disease types using the Illumina Trusight Tumor 17- solid tumor next-generation sequencing panel at its European facility in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. The company will then contribute the data it generates to the SPECTA database.
"We are proud to have been chosen by the EORTC as a partner of choice for the molecular profiling of these valuable SPECTA samples and excited by the opportunities the generation of this data will provide to improve patient care," Michael Sloan, VP of commercial operations at Almac, said in a statement.
The EORTC hopes the additions to the SPECTA database will serve as a resource to the onocology community, to provide therapeutic development and identification of novel biomarkers of response and prognosis as well as diagnosis of cancer patients.
"This agreement with Almac Diagnostics is one of several key partnerships EORTC has established to further develop the SPECTA infrastructure," EORTC Medical Director Vassilis Golfinopoulos added. "Through the Illumina Trusight Tumor 170 solid tumor NGS panel and pipeline, EORTC seeks to improve substantially all stages of therapeutic agents development, from early clinical assessment to refinement of targeted molecular indications."