NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Intermountain Healthcare said this week that it is launching Navican, a new genomic testing and research company focused on preventing disease and personalizing treatment options for advanced cancer patients.
Through Navican, patients within Intermountain's integrated healthcare system can get tested on an internally developed next-generation sequencing platform that gauges a range of actionable genes implicated in cancer. Navican will also use the test developed at Intermountain to diagnose patients and explore personalized treatment options, and will have access to "limited distribution and specialty drugs for patients," according to Intermountain.
The company will be led by President and CEO Ingo Chakravarty, who has previously held various executive positions at GenMark Diagnostics, Gen-Probe, and Roche Diagnostics. He will lead a team that works with doctors, drug companies, and other leaders in healthcare to identify treatments and clinical trial options for patients.
“We have reached a time where diagnostic and therapeutic technologies can become a synergistic, clinical portfolio used to aid in the management and wellbeing of community based cancer patients, and that’s precisely what we are going to do,” said Chakravarty in a statement.
Intermountain, a healthcare provider in Utah and Idaho, launched a precision oncology program three years ago, and has genomically profiled approximately 700 patients advanced cancer patients since then. These advanced cancer patients receive testing on an NGS panel that analyzes alterations in 96 cancer-related genes. Lincoln Nadauld, director of cancer genomics at Intermountain, recently told GenomeWeb that the panel will soon be expanded to include additional actionable genes.