Exact Sciences’ testing laboratory selected by the National Cancer Institute

Exact Sciences announced that the National Cancer Institute, or NCI, has selected the company’s testing laboratory in Phoenix, AZ to participate in the ComboMATCH clinical trials, one of the NCI-funded precision medicine initiatives. As a ComboMATCH-designated lab, Exact Sciences will use its new OncoExTra test to analyze tumor tissue and paired normal blood samples from patient participants and uncover the specific abnormalities in a patient’s tumor that may be most effective to treat. OncoExTra is a comprehensive next-generation sequencing, or NGS, test that provides a comprehensive molecular picture of the patient’s cancer and actionable results, matching a patient’s unique cancer to a targeted therapy or clinical trial. The OncoExTra test profiles the entire exome, or DNA, and the transcriptome, or RNA, across approximately 20,000 genes, uncovering variants possibly missed by only evaluating DNA. It also uses matched tumor-normal sequencing to limit potentially false positive results and allow physicians to make clinical decisions based on variants related only to the tumor.