Working Together for Personalized Medicine

Our aim is to increase the pace of commercialisation of our existing Symphony™ suite of breast cancer tests, apply our Symphony™ model to other cancers, and eventually expand our product offering into other cancer molecular diagnostic platforms and technologies, with a view to achieving a sustainable molecular diagnostics franchise in oncology.

We currently have collaborations with several research institutes that have well-annotated clinical tissue banks, providing us additional opportunities to discover and validate new gene signatures or biomarkers based on studies of tissue bank samples.

Overall, we currently have collaborations or alliances with over 50 cancer research institutes and hospitals worldwide, in various projects to develop new gene signatures and biomarkers, run clinical studies and access tumour samples.

In addition to our collaborations with certain major international pharmaceutical companies under the auspices of the MINDACT and I-SPY2 trials, we have also begun collaborating directly with certain pharmaceutical companies to explore new companion diagnostics for new investigational cancer drugs.

Alliances with Pharmaceutical Companies

Clinical Studies

We believe prospective clinical studies provide the optimal study design for development of our new products. A prospective study follows a group of patients with a particular form of cancer over time, who differ with respect to certain factors under investigation, to determine how these factors affect outcomes. We are currently participating in three major prospective clinical studies, MINDACT (a breast cancer study), I-SPY2 (a breast cancer study) and PARSC (a colon cancer study), all of which are utilising our MammaPrint® or ColoPrint® product to pre-select patient groups for particular cancer treatments.

Biomarkers for Pathway-targeted Therapies

The identification of crucial signalling pathways has led to the development of targeted drugs designed to inhibit these pathways. We have gathered gene expression and gene mutation data on thousands of colon cancer and breast cancer tissue samples and we can use this data in our discovery projects on particular genetic pathway signatures, seeking to identify multiple key drivers of cancer cell behaviour in various forms of cancer. We have begun collaborations with certain major international pharmaceutical companies and academic partners to identify new biomarkers and develop new tests for predicting response to these targeted therapies in the treatment of breast, colon and lung cancer. In the course of these efforts, we have begun to develop more sophisticated molecular diagnostics, integrating multiple diagnostic strategies, which we believe will lead to a new generation of multi-index tests in molecular cancer diagnostics.

Collaborative Development: Patient Sample to Diagnosis Process Enhancement

Our business is built on the core competencies of our founders’ world-renowned research and clinical experience in the field of genomics. Agendia’s culture is unique in terms of its unbiased scientific approach, pairing the optimum methodologies with disruptive technologies, to achieve ground-breaking, clinically meaningful results. We apply a “best in class” approach to maintain a leadership position in the rapidly evolving field of molecular diagnostics. We are committed to providing accurate, clinically relevant diagnostic assays to physicians and their patients.

Two of our founders, Professors Bernards and van’t Veer, are recognized world leaders in the field of molecular diagnostics and hold academic positions at leading comprehensive cancer centres (the NKI and the University of California at San Francisco, respectively). We believe these appointments place us in an excellent position to partner with the academic world to develop molecular diagnostics discovery programs. We also participate in a number of European research networks funded by the European Union, RATHER and COLTHERES. We believe our participation in these networks, our strategic alliances with leading academic consortia as well as with large international pharmaceutical companies will contribute to our ability to develop new molecular diagnostic tests in breast cancer and other cancer areas, and further advance our research and development pipeline.

For more information, contact Agendia Business Development.