Barcelona-based testing service will advance cancer research and enable clinicians to personalize treatments more accurately and quickly for patients with late-stage cancer
Barcelona, May 25, 2022 – Guardant Health, Inc. (Nasdaq: GH), a leading precision oncology company, and the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), one of Europe’s leading cancer research organizations, today announced that the first blood-based cancer testing services in Europe based on Guardant Health’s industry-leading digital sequencing platform are now available at the VHIO liquid biopsy testing facility in Barcelona.
Guardant Health and VHIO established the partnership in January 2021 to give more patients access to Guardant Health’s industry leading liquid biopsy technology. This testing service will provide essential genomic information through comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) for patients with any solid cancerous tumor. From a simple blood draw, the test identifies patients with actionable biomarkers more quickly than starting with tissue biopsy. The VHIO testing services will be available for clinical research and clinical care.
“The opening of this service will give more patients with advanced cancer access to blood-based biomarker testing and help their healthcare professionals make more informed treatment decisions,” said Helmy Eltoukhy, Guardant Health co-CEO. “We look forward to continuing to build our partnership with VHIO, working together to ensure cancer patients across Spain and beyond have access to the latest innovations in precision oncology and striving to achieve better patient outcomes.”
“The incorporation of this technology in VHIO will enable us to continue advancing towards precision medicine, improving the use of liquid biopsy to detect genomic alterations in tumors and come out with more effective treatments for patients,” said Dr Josep Tabernero, Director of VHIO and Head of the Medical Oncology Department of Vall d’Hebron University Hospital. “Our goal is to ensure that the use of liquid biopsy becomes a common diagnostic option, so that oncologists can use it to determine the best treatment for their patients. Thanks to this agreement, we can move towards this scenario.”
“Implementing this technology in our lab is a leap forward in the liquid field for us. We have performed an in-house extensive analytical validation of the assay and we attain very high levels of sensitivity and specificity with the test,” said Dr Ana Vivancos, Group Leader of the VHIO Cancer Genomics Group, where this testing will take place. “Guardant Health’s next generation broad panel sequencing technology gives us the capabilities to screen for a large number of gene mutations and provides complete genomic results without the need for a tissue sample.”
In 2020, there were over 282,000 new cancer cases in Spain and approximately 113,000 cancer deaths, with lung cancer and colon cancer being the leading causes of cancer-related death.1 Guardant Health’s tests are used by oncologists around the world to guide treatment decisions across solid tumor cancers, and by pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers in clinical trials to accelerate precision medicine drug development.
References
- International Agency for Research on Cancer. World Health Organization. https://gco.iarc.fr/today/data/factsheets/populations/724-spain-fact-sheets.pdf. Accessed online May 18, 2022.
