Almac Diagnostic Services Validates Illumina TruSight® Tumor 170 Cancer Mutation Panel for Prospective Testing in Clinical Trials
April 16, 2018
Almac Diagnostic Services Validates Illumina TruSight® Tumor 170 Cancer Mutation Panel for Prospective Testing in Clinical Trials
CLIA compliant assay, for clinical trial use, including US and Europe
Validation performance specifications for review on Almac Diagnostic Services’ website
Craigavon, N.I., Monday 16th April 2018 – Almac Diagnostic Services, a global stratified medicine company specializing in biomarker driven clinical trials, has analytically validated Illumina’s TruSight® Tumor 170 cancer mutation panel as an IUO assay for prospective testing in clinical trials.
Almac Diagnostic Services is now in a position to partner with interested Pharmaceutical and Biotech firms with the Almac clinical trial assay to support clinical trial enrichment for future cancer trials.
Almac Diagnostic Services was one of only a handful of labs globally to be granted beta test site status for the Illumina TruSight® Tumor 170 panel. This facilitated early access to the RUO version of the panel prior to Illumina’s initial commercial release back in 2016 and has allowed the labs at Almac to build up a vast amount of experience with the cancer panel over an extended period of time.
The Almac Illumina TruSight® Tumor 170 Clinical Trial Assay is a Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) assay for use with FFPE tissue from solid tumors that targets DNA and RNA variants from the same sample. The Almac assay covers common cancer genes including key actionable mutations across multiple cancers. It targets single nucleotide variants, indels and gene fusions. The clinical trial assay does not cover amplifications or splice variants, but these can be identified in the RUO version of the assay also offered by Almac Diagnostic Services.
Michael Sloan, Global VP of Commercial Development, Almac Diagnostic Services said: “This Almac Diagnostic Services clinical trial assay will provide Pharmaceutical and Biotech companies with a new option in the marketplace to support their clinical trials and CDx development. The assay, based on the Illumina TruSight Tumor 170 chemistry and NextSeq platform, allows multiple biomarkers to be evaluated from one sample, thereby reducing the quantity of precious tissue sample necessary and offering a highly cost effective solution that will ultimately be kit-able further downstream.
He continued: “It’s a strong tool in our repertoire of broad screening assays for our clients. This offering can enable them to assess both DNA and RNA on an appropriate broad range of genes. From the Pharma or Biotech perspective, they’re going to have a drug, or a panel of drugs, for which they want to select a relevant biomarker to enable personalized treatment. So it’s an optimal screening mechanism for them.”
Almac Diagnostic Services offers clients powerful reporting for the assay through their own bioinformatics pipeline and software solution providing enhanced variant call reproducibility, accuracy and QC. Should clients also need further RUO interpretation of detected variants, Almac can also offer ‘IBM Watson for Genomics’ reporting for processed samples.
For more information on the Almac TruSight® Tumor 170 clinical trial assay and to view the validation performance specification visit the Almac Diagnostic Services website:
https://www.almacgroup.com/diagnostics/trusighttumor170/
ENDS
About Almac Diagnostic Services
Almac Diagnostic Services is a global stratified medicine company specializing in biomarker driven clinical trials. The company is focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of diagnostic and companion diagnostic tests. We partner with biopharma companies to provide solutions ranging from biomarker discovery to CDx development including regulatory submissions and commercialization. We also facilitate biomarker clinical trial management and clinical test delivery from our CLIA-accredited labs. The tests developed at Almac Diagnostic Services have a wide range of applications including patient selection, and are utilized in phase I to phase III registrational clinical trials.
For more information visit: almacgroup.com/diagnostics
About Almac Group
‘Partnering to Advance Human Health’
The Almac Group is an established contract development and manufacturing organization that provides an extensive range of integrated services to the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors globally. The services range from R&D, biomarker discovery development and commercialization, API manufacture, formulation development, clinical trial supply, IXRS® technology (IVRS/IWRS) through to commercial-scale manufacture.
The international company is a privately owned organization that has organically grown over almost 50 years and now employs close to 5600 highly skilled personnel. Almac is headquartered in Craigavon, Northern Ireland with operations in the UK, Ireland, across the US (Pennsylvania, North Carolina and California) and in Asia (Singapore and Tokyo).