Turku, Finland — 20.5.2024. The new method will enable cost-efficient, rapid, and sensitive molecular precision diagnostics for cancer.
Tissue biopsies have traditionally been the mainstay for diagnosing cancer, but now, liquid biopsies, drawn from a simple blood sample, are emerging as a less invasive option. While liquid biopsies offer advantages like easier disease monitoring and overcoming tumor heterogeneity, challenges like cost and detection limits hinder their widespread use.
Genomill has developed Bridge Capture™, a novel method included in Geno1®, that combines the advantages of market-leading liquid biopsy technologies while eliminating the need to compromise between sensitivity, scalability, cost-efficiency, or panel size.
High performance combined with simplicity leading to global reach and access
Genomill CTO Manu Tamminen says that the solution addresses the challenges of hybrid capture and amplicon-based technologies, “Amplicon-based technologies are simple but provide limited scalability, while hybrid capture methods are expensive and slow. Our method removes these compromises.”
In their latest pre-print publication, Genomill demonstrated performance that matched and even surpassed commercially available leading technologies for cancer diagnostics, such as ArcherDx LIQUIDPlex and Illumina AmpliSeq. They also showed that Geno1® can now be implemented in new laboratory settings without complicated and resource-consuming onboarding. Additionally, the sequencing depth required is low, allowing for conducting the analyses on benchtop sequencing devices, and the technology can be scaled for any number of samples or targets without any theoretical or practical upper limits.
Tamminen adds, “We compared Bridge Capture™ to two other leading commercial technologies currently available for liquid biopsies and found high mutant allele frequency (MAF) concordance as well as the lowest MAF among the three technologies on matched contrived colorectal biospecimens mimicking ctDNA. Additionally, the high level of sensitivity that Bridge Capture™ has demonstrated proves Geno1®’s potential for MRD diagnostics.”
Democratizing small-scale sequencing for smaller-scale hospitals and laboratories
Genomill CEO Kalle Koskinen says, ”We were thrilled to see a very high correlation between the results by us and 3rd party independent laboratories, by using a kit and simple instructions received from us”. Additionally, we demonstrate its capabilities to utilize bench-top sequencers for low MAF patient samples affordably. We strongly believe that Bridge Capture™ will considerably enhance cancer diagnostics as a cost-efficient, simple, rapid, and sensitive precision diagnostic tool.”
Contact information:
Kalle Koskinen, CEO, kalle(a)genomill.com
Manu Tamminen, CTO, manu(a)genomill.com