The study, which showed that the disease may not only result from tobacco exposure as previously thought, could lay the groundwork for targeted therapies.
Backed by large public companies and growing prospective data, the first molecular blood tests to screen for multiple cancers are approaching commercialization.
The collaboration builds on an oligonucleotide supply agreement the partners signed in 2019 for Clear Labs' nanopore sequencing-based food safety testing.
With clinical sequencing data for almost 400 appendiceal cancer cases, researchers identified somatic differences in individuals diagnosed with the disease before the age of 50.
At the Association for Molecular Pathology annual meeting, cancer researcher William Hahn talked about efforts to map cancer fitness genes at the genome scale.
Using tumor and matched normal sequence data generated for tens of thousands of cancer patients, the team identified mosaic cancer susceptibility in around one in 1,000 cases.