Abstract
The network of partners using PierianDx' genetic testing software and services will soon take in two Arizona-based institutions, the University of Arizona and Phoenix Children's Hospital. Both institutions, announced PierianDx, have signed customer contracts.
The University of Arizona Genomics Core intends to leverage PierianDx expertise and Clinical Genomicist Workstation (CGW) as its clinical bioinformatics tool to help it develop and validate a large custom cancer panel of more than 500 genes.
Phoenix Children's Hospital is working with PierianDx to develop and validate a clinical next-generation sequencing test that will be used in a pediatric cancer clinical trial. This test will be the first of its kind encompassing nonmalignant exome, cancer exome, and RNA sequencing.
According to PierianDx, sharing is a pillar of the CGW solution: “From sharing best practices for clinical assay development and validated computational pipelines to annotated medical publications and clinical interpretations, we believe that everyone benefits from shared insights. Our platform is designed to facilitate sharing while protecting patient privacy and your intellectual property.”
CGW provides genomic databases, medical knowledge bases, clinically validated multigene panels, analytical pipelines, and report-generation tools. Offered through a Software as a Service Agreement (SaaS), and working within a HIPAA and HITECH compliant cloud-based IT infrastructure, CGW can manage the data and workflow for each clinical patient case.
“The software will help us to streamline the reporting of genomic profiling results to our physicians and will facilitate the curation of a clinical grade variant database,” said Michael Hammer, Ph.D., director of the University of Arizona Genetics Core. “Not only will this partnership aid our oncologists in the pursuit of better treatments for their cancer patients today, this will provide unprecedented opportunities to match the right patient with the right treatment.”
”Phoenix Children's has a unique approach to these highly comprehensive genomic analyses-driven clinical trials for pediatric patients,” said Nazneen Aziz, Ph.D., chief research officer for Phoenix Children's Hospital. “Drug development for pediatric cancers is an area that has not received due attention, so we are hopeful that with this approach, many new treatment options for children suffering from various types of cancer will be identified.”