Guardant Health has added Bristol-Myers Squibb to the group of pharmaceutical companies it is working with to develop the GuardantOMNI assay, a 500-plus-gene liquid biopsy panel designed to accelerate clinical trials and the research of targeted cancer drugs and immunotherapies.
Development of GuardantOMNI has been ongoing since January 2017 with AstraZeneca, Merck, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, and Pfizer. The assay is designed to help investigators screen patients for multiple clinical trial options with a simple blood draw, to allow low-risk, real-time monitoring of tumor response and tumor evolution, and to support analysis of tumor mutational burden for use with immunotherapy trials.
"Our agreement with Guardant Health will allow us to further explore genomic biomarkers as we advance our clinical-stage pipeline," said Bruce Car, head of translational sciences at Bristol-Myers Squibb. "Non-invasive methods of acquiring tumor DNA will provide more data, potentially leading to greater insights into patient response."