Presenting PGA: A New Cutting-Edge Tool for Cancer Theranostics

OncoDxRx’s scientists have developed a new cancer diagnosis tool that merges gene expression details with drug efficacy information allowing clinicians to select the most effective drug(s), potentially improving cancer treatment outcome.

For past few years, one of the most prevalent and trustworthy tools used by clinicians to treat various cancers has been targeted therapy—assessing tumor genetic profile using next-generation sequencing (NGS) in order to look for actionable mutations of the disease for personalized and precision therapy. Despite having established itself as an accurate and reliable method of diagnostics, the NGS platforms can only qualify 20-30% cancer patients for targeted therapies, leaving 70-80% patients out of precision medicine.

OncoDxRx has now invented a way to offer to this particular population. Its flagship technology, PGA (Patient-derived Gene expression-informed Anti-cancer drug efficacy), targets this non-responder population whose biomarker testing are negative, hence completing the puzzle and benefiting the entire cancer population.

The PGA breakthrough consists of a liquid biopsy platform that integrates the gene expression patterns gained from each individual patient with details obtained from in silico drug screening, matching and ranking.

“This work is a critical next step for taking our proprietary knowhow about circulating cell-free mRNA in the research space and turning them into a tool that is actually useful in the clinic,” said the company.

“PGA fully merges the two modalities, gene and drug, It’s remarkable.”

Based on the clinical results, the team is hoping that, as well as recognizing existing drugs, the tool might be able to identify new classes of drugs based on the gene expression characteristics of the patient.

“This CLIA-validated platform gives you an ability to search across the anti-cancer drug library for a wide range of combinations that could be useful and select the ones with the best performance for a particular tumor in a particular patient,” the firm explained. “We feel like we have a tool kit now that will allow us to find these in a relatively rapid manner across cancer types.”

As a next step, OncoDxRx’s team is planning on commercializing PGA in cancers such as lung, breast and pancreatic cancer.

“The future of molecular diagnostic is digital, and PGA could not only transform how clinicians treat cancer, but also change how we shape the Dx-Rx landscape of tomorrow,” concluded the company.