Date: 2011-05-16
Type of information: Collaboration agreement
Compound: genomic testing for drug development
Company: Quintiles (USA) Population Genetics Technologies (UK)
Therapeutic area: Drug development
Type agreement: collaboration
Action mechanism:
Disease:
Details: Quintiles and Population Genetics Technologies Ltd have announced a commercial collaboration to bring genomic testing into mainstream drug development in order to produce safer, more effective medicines. Through the non-exclusive collaboration, Quintiles and PGT will jointly identify opportunities to apply the power of large-scale genomic analyses –using samples from hundreds to thousands of individuals –to test clinical hypotheses and correlate biomarkers of disease prognosis and drug responsiveness. This approach enables the rapid identification of rare and common alleles that collectively account for significant variation in treatment responses.Such large-scale testing has been prohibitively expensive, as sample preparation, sequencing and analysis have to be undertaken separately for each sample. PGT’s technology can process many hundreds of genomes simultaneously, in a single sequencing assay, while still retaining the ability to identify each individual genome during post-sequencing data analysis. The first project of the new partners is a renal cancer clinical trial to identify genetic markers predictive of both adverse events and efficacy. But their workflows are appropriate to all therapeutic areas and they are currently running programs in breast cancer, leukemia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Financial terms: Financial details were not disclosed.
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