EORTC expands collaborative agreement
The European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) has announced it is expanding its collaborative agreement with Ignyta Inc.
Ignyta will serve as a diagnostic laboratory performing fusion testing for EORTC’s Screening Patients for Efficient Clinical Trial Access (SPECTA) initiative.
Part of the testing will include identifying patients who harbour a gene fusion for the NTRK, ROS1 or ALK genes for potential inclusion in Ignyta’s global phase two clinical study of their treatment candidate entrectinib.
The genetic data obtained from this screening will also be available for potential future academic research.
Zachary Hornby, chief operating officer (COO) at Ignyta said: “EORTC’s SPECTA network includes a broad pool of clinical trial sites, tissue samples and patient data, which is helping us identify patients with a variety of tumour histologies across Europe who could potentially be enrolled in our STARTRK-2 clinical trial, and may benefit from entrectinib, our CNS-penetrant, targeted Trk, ROS1 and ALK inhibitor.
“We are happy to work with EORTC to demonstrate the value of biomarker-driven clinical trials to bring forward innovative, targeted cancer medicines.”
EORTC’s SPECTA programme is a pan-European biobank and molecular profiling platform for patients in colorectal, brain, lung, melanoma and rare cancers, which aims to optimise drug access, help advance the development of targeted treatments and accelerate new healthcare delivery
Medical director at EORTC Vassilis Golfinopoulos said: “Identification of specific genetic mutations provides opportunities for improving treatment efficacy in cancer patients.
“This is at the heart of our SPECTA programme, which helps oncologists find trials that are adapted to their patients’ needs. The collaboration with Ignyta is allowing more patients to be screened, and providing more data to advance the development of precision medicine in cancer.
EORTC research projects are funded through several sources including the EORTC Cancer Research fund and Horizon 2020.
