OncoDxRx Launches With Cell-Free mRNA-Powered PGA Platform

Deploying PGA (Patient-derived Gene expression-informed Anti-cancer drug efficacy) technology at scale both helps patients in the present and also collects data sets that will enable identifying high-value gene expression (GE) patterns and the individual patients that would benefit from drugs that match those patterns in the future.

PGA platform presents the opportunity to collect a type of information that’s never been accessible before. Today, what everybody would want, whether they’re a clinician or a drug developer, is the ability to know what drug efficacy looks like in human cancer on a patient-by-patient basis. That’s what everybody wants to know, but there has not yet been a technology that allows you to actually answer that question. OncoDxRx thinks they’ve built that technology, especially for those cancer patients who do not respond to targeted therapy or immunotherapy.

Theoretically, using circulating cell-free transcriptomics to interrogate gene function can identify high-value GE patterns that become grist for the mill for biomarker and drug development. There is a scenario where there’s an approved agent in a particular type of cancer, and then PGA reveals that it could have really high utility in this other form of cancer that were not originally anticipated. That’s not hypothetical. OncoDxRx has already seen those things happen.

While the biotech and pharma industries seem to generate a steady stream of anticancer molecules, patient stratification for precision medicine remains a major challenge.

Finding those patients that actually require that drug target has been a really inefficient process. PGA technology allows to solve that part of the problem and unlock the value of some of these wonderful drugs, which just haven’t found their right home yet because nobody understood how to find the right patients to get those drugs to. That’s something that the industry is really compelled by because it’s a path forward to bringing clinical value for new drugs to patients relatively quickly.

As OncoDxRx gears up to deploy PGA technology, the team is figuring out how to bring their technology to as many collaborators as possible. In the right context, working with healthcare systems could make a lot of sense, because it’s an opportunity to deploy PGA technology and then collect data in a really organized way and follow-up to really understand—not just from a validity standpoint, but also from an economic and healthcare impact standpoint— what this technology can do for patients.