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Gene Editing Institute licenses gene editing technology to NovellusDx
The Gene Editing Institute of Christiana Care Health System and NovellusDx announced a partnership both entities say will accelerate progress toward personalized cancer medicine.
The Gene Editing Institute licensed its gene editing technology to NovellusDx, which intends to use the technology to improve the efficiency and speed of its cancer diagnostic screening tools.
“This partnership promises to redefine and transform cancer treatment by speeding progress in breakthrough personalized medicine for many forms of cancer,” Nicholas J. Petrelli, MD, medical director of Christiana Care’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute and a HemOnc Today Editorial Board Member, said in the release.
NovellusDx will pay royalties to Christiana Care for 10 years.
“Combining our state-of-the-art gene editing technology with NovellusDx’s expertise will accelerate and improve NovellusDx’s diagnostic testing process, reducing the time it takes to generate the treatment options for the physician and the patient,” Eric Kmiec, PhD, director of the Gene Editing Institute, said in the release. “This will lead to immediate clinical applications and the delivery of precision and personalized cancer therapy at its very best.”
The screening tools are designed to identify genetic abnormalities for both the onset and progression of various malignancies and screen a series of known cancer drugs against those mutations to determine their efficacy.
NovellusDx will use the gene editing technology to try to identify the genetic mechanism responsible for the onset and progression of several cancer types, define the impact of each gene mutation on the activity of a tumor’s signaling pathways, and suggest the most effective therapy.
“This work has the potential to change the way cancer treatment is carried out,” Haim Gil-Ad, CEO of NovellusDx, said in the release. “Once the genetic makeup of a patient is known, we will be able to immediately test and monitor the effect of a patient’s mutations in live cells and determine the appropriate treatment for that patient.”