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Personalis Announces Expansion of Its Patent Portfolio Related to Tumor-Informed Detection of Molecular Residual Disease
MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Personalis, Inc. (Nasdaq: PSNL), a leader in advanced genomics for cancer, has added another patent family to its
About this update from Personalis, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":" MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nPersonalis, Inc. (Nasdaq: PSNL), a leader in advanced genomics for cancer, has added another patent family to its molecular residual disease (MRD)-related IP portfolio, with priority to January 2013. US Patent No. 11,384,394 describes the detection of MRD and recurrence by using whole genome sequencing of a patient’s tumor to identify variants for a personalized liquid biopsy assay.\n\nAs with recently issued US Patent 11,299,783, the ‘394 patent covers many elements of Personalis’ NeXT Personal™ platform, including that it describes a highly sensitive measurement of tumor burden with simultaneous tracking of up to thousands of tumor variants, both tumor-informed and prespecified, in a single panel design. Prespecified variants from a database may be used to identify resistance to a tumor therapy, or the emergence of a second, unrelated tumor.\n\nTumors can be detected by the DNA they shed into a patient’s blood plasma, but the amount of that DNA can be very low. After a tumor has been surgically resected, it may be present at just a few parts per million. At that level, most parts of the tumor genome are not present in a plasma sample. To improve the chances of detecting a signal, data can be combined from several tumor mutation positions in a genome. Since the position of these mutations is not stereotypical in most cancers and appear in different positions across the genome for each patient’s tumor, using an older, tumor-agnostic (fixed panel) approach to cancer sequencing wastes up to 99.9% of sequence reads because they cover parts of the genome where that patient’s tumor does not have a mutation. If, instead, a patient’s tumor is sequenced once to identify where a patient’s mutations are on the genome, a custom assay can then view just those positions whenever a blood sample needs to be analyzed.\n\nBy eliminating wasted sequencing, it also becomes practical to sequence deeply enough to identify even minute tumor signals. This is called a tumor-informed approach. To identify the slightest trace of cancer, Personalis’ NeXT Personal looks for the fingerprint of each tumor (its mutations) at almost two thousand places across the genome. Most tumors have that many mutations, but only a few percent are in the coding regions of the genome, where an exome could capture them. To find thousan...