ArcherDx Inc, Boulder, Colo, has announced a research collaboration with University College London (UCL) and the Francis Crick Institute to use the company’s proprietary anchored multiplex PCR (AMP) technology to detect evidence of disease recurrence in lung cancer patients from cell-free circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). The effort is part of a clinical study funded by Cancer Research UK and sponsored by UCL, to track lung cancer evolution through treatment (TraceRx).
Josh Stahl, ArcherDx.
Preliminary findings from the TraceRx clinical study were published in Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017. In the publications, UCL and TraceRx investigators demonstrated that a patient-specific approach to ctDNA profiling could be used to characterize minimal residual disease in patients who have undergone potentially curative surgery for lung cancer.
Early detection of changes in ctDNA burden after the initiation of curative therapy has been associated in clinical literature with poor disease-free survival. In collaboration with ArcherDx, the UCL and TraceRx investigators aim to expand upon these initial findings by developing patient-specific assays based on AMP technology to detect low-volume minimal residual disease at high levels of sensitivity, and to 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,” says Charles Swanton, MD, PhD, lead researcher for the TraceRx study.
“This collaboration aligns closely with ArcherDx’s mission to expand access and adoption of personalized medicine in oncology,” says Josh Stahl, executive vice president and chief scientific officer of ArcherDx. “We’ve spent the last 5 years developing and continually evolving our technology for complex and groundbreaking applications like those being studied in the TraceRx study. We are especially pleased to be a part of this study as it has the potential to fundamentally transform patient care in early stage lung cancer.”
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