Myriad Genetics on Monday announced an agreement with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to support research focused on metastatic renal cell carcinoma treatment selection and response.
The project will use Myriad’s minimal residual disease (MRD) testing platform, a tumor-informed high-definition assay that detects circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). The MRD test is available for use in research studies pursued jointly by Myriad and academic or pharmaceutical investigators. It can be used to monitor ctDNA levels during treatment and surveillance following diagnosis.
The research team will investigate the use of Myriad’s MRD testing platform as a noninvasive tool to inform treatment selection, surveillance, and radiotherapy treatment response in individuals with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC).
There currently is a lack of noninvasive testing platforms available for RCC, and MRD tests based on exome sequencing of the tumor may not track enough variants to be sufficiently sensitive. The goal of this research is to determine whether patients with RCC will benefit from a comprehensive genome-wide approach to MRD with the Myriad Genetics platform.
“Whereas most currently available MRD tests monitor 50 or fewer variants from the tumor, we suspect our MRD assay will be more sensitive in RCC because it tracks up to thousands of variants identified by sequencing the tumor's whole genome,” Dale Muzzey, chief scientific officer of Myriad Genetics, said in a statement.
