Expanding the personalized medicine landscape to chronic diseases
AstraZeneca and Qiagen have partnered to develop companion diagnostics (CDx) for chronic diseases.
A decade ago, AstraZeneca (Cambridge, UK) first teamed up with Qiagen (Hilden, Germany) to develop a CDx for identifying non-small cell lung cancer. The result was the therascreen® EGFR CDx, which advises the use of IRESSA, AstraZeneca’s FDA-approved drug for treating metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. Now, their latest collaboration means that for the first time, Qiagen’s QIAstat-Dx testing platform will be used to identify chronic diseases outside of oncology.
CDx tests are used to pair a patient with a specific treatment option. They guide personalized treatments by identifying and validating biomarkers within patients to predict a patient’s likelihood of benefiting from a drug. This has several advantages, including improving disease outcomes, accelerating the drug development pipeline, and reducing medical expenses by only recommending a specific drug for patients who will respond to that treatment [1]. Combining the development of a CDx along with a drug, as AstraZeneca and Qiagen hope to do for chronic diseases, can also expedite the drug’s approval.
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The goal of their current collaboration is to accelerate decision-making in evaluating patients’ applicability for AstraZeneca’s genomically-targeted medicines by integrating genotyping into routine clinical examinations using a new QIAstat-Dx genotyping assay.
Fernando Beils, Senior Vice President and Head of the Molecular Diagnostics Business Area at Qiagen, commented:
“We are pleased to expand our partnership with AstraZeneca into new disease areas using our QIAstat Dx system and to develop together the first CDx for chronic diseases based on this platform. The development of the QIAstat-Dx genotyping assay with AstraZeneca showcases Qiagen’s expertise in CDx development and commercialization, utilizing the most suitable molecular testing platform to meet the unique clinical and commercial needs of patient testing.”
Qiagen’s QIAstat-Dx is a syndromic testing platform that utilizes assay cartridges with preloaded reagents and multiplex PCR technology to identify and distinguish many different biomarkers in a patient sample, producing results in just 1 hour.
Although the companies have not stated the chronic disease they will target, this partnership marks an important step forward in expanding the personalized medicine landscape to diseases beyond cancer.
