Personalis and UCSF to study utility of ctDNA for treatment response in CRC

Personalis announced a collaboration with UC San Francisco UCSF that will deploy a personalized liquid biopsy-based research use only or RUO assay for a study of patients with colorectal cancer. The research efforts will use Personalis’ NeXT Personal(TM) assay to evaluate circulating tumor DNA or ctDNA-based signatures associated with treatment response and adverse events in a cohort of late-stage colorectal cancer patients receiving capecitabine together with pembrolizumab and bevacizumab. Colorectal cancer is among the top five most prevalent and deadly malignancies worldwide. The efficacy of combined targeted therapy approaches varies widely, reflecting the need for more sophisticated predictive measures. Typical ctDNA assays in use today lack sufficient sensitivity for detecting cfDNA-based biomarkers due to extensive disease heterogeneity, potentially low levels of signal from small metastases, and the wide range of mutational profiles relevant to different types of cancer.