Using next-generation Circulating Tumor Cell (CTC) technology to capture, count and characterize circulating tumor cells in patients' blood, Johnson and Johnson and Massachusetts General Hospital hope to equip doctors with a more advanced non-invasive way to find out from a few cells how much a cancer has spread, personalize treatment for patients, and monitor their progress.
Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cells that have come away from a primary tumor, are circulating in the bloodstream, and have the potential to seed secondary tumors in another part of the body.
On Monday, Veridex, a Johnson and Johnson company, announced the new partnership will also involve Ortho Biotech Oncology Research & Development (ORD), a unit of Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development that has expertise in oncology therapeutics, biomarkers and companion diagnostics.
Veridex already markets the first FDA-approved CTC test, the CellSearch blood test, launched in 2004.
The company says that "CTCs are proven to be an independent predictor of Overall Survival (OS) and Progression Free Survival (PFS)", and that "... monitoring of CTCs can indicate a significant change in prognosis as early as after the first treatment cycle and at each step of the way".
By partnering with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), who bring expertise in new CTC technologies, Veridex hope the collaboration will be able to exploit the latest technological, biological and clinical innovations to produce a more advanced diagnostic tool that oncologists can use for personalizing patient care, and a more advanced investigative tool that researchers and developers can use to speed up and improve the discovery and development of new drugs.
The result will be a "bench-top system" that will "specifically isolate and explore the biology of rare cells at the protein, RNA and DNA levels", said the Veridex statement.
Dr Mehmet Toner, director of the BioMicroElectroMechanical Systems Resource Center in the MGH Center for Engineering in Medicine, said:
"We have developed and continue to develop a broad range of technologies that are evolving what we know about cancer and cancer care."
"This collaboration is an opportunity to apply our past learning to the advancement of a platform that will ultimately benefit patients with cancer," he added.
Veridex's Head of Technology Innovation and Strategy, Robert McCormack, told the press that:
"This new technology has the potential to facilitate an easy-to-administer, non-invasive blood test that would allow us to count tumor cells, and to characterize the biology of the cells."
"Harnessing the information contained in these cells in an in vitro clinical setting could enable tools to help select treatment and monitor how patients are responding," he added.
Nicholas Dracopoli, ORD's Vice President for Biomarkers, said new technologies that "allow us to use CTCs for the first time as templates for novel DNA, RNA and protein biomarkers" are giving CTCs a bigger role in drug discovery and development.
"Given the demand for actionable data to guide personalized medicine for patients with cancer, there is a rapidly growing need for advanced, automated non-invasive technologies that can aid in selection of treatment and monitor response throughout the course of their disease," he explained.
Sources: Johnson & Johnson (press statement 3 Jan 2011)
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