Pairing Finger Stick Samples With NGS, Circulogene Joins Liquid Biopsy Field’s Growing Ranks

from GenomeWeb by Molika Ashford

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Hot on the heels of several other new liquid biopsy companies, Circulogene — a new firm offering NGS detection of cancer mutations using finger stick-volume blood samples — announced recently that it has begun commercial operations out of its CLIA-certified Birmingham, Alabama lab.

The company hopes to distinguish itself in a crowding field by enabling testing of much smaller sample volumes than other technologies via a proprietary method for the isolation and enrichment of circulating tumor DNA.

Chen-Hsiung Yeh, Circulogene’s chief scientific officer, told GenomeWeb that the company is currently processing samples, though not at a very high volume yet.

The firm’s initial offering is a pan-cancer sequencing assay that covers approximately 3,000 hotspot mutations in 50 of the most clinically relevant cancer genes. Though the company runs the same panel for any cancer patient, specific subsets of genes may have more relevance for one or another tumor type. Overall, the test is marketed for melanoma, breast, colorectal, lung, GIST, hematological, ovarian, pancreatic, gastric, and thyroid cancers.

Circulogene is an independent company that was spun off from cardiovascular testing company Atherotech Diagnostics, Yeh told GenomeWeb. (read more…)