The company has announced an expanded research collaboration with Professor Charles Swanton, at the University College London (UCL) Cancer Institute.

Last year, SAGA and UCL entered into a research collaboration on a limited number of patients. With the newly signed agreement, SAGA will utilize its SAGAsafe assays for detection of a panel of mutations in EGFR and other genes and perform analyses on several hundred clinical tissue samples from the Cancer Research UK-funded UCL-sponsored TRACERx and PEACE studies. The TRACERx study focuses on cancer evolution in lung cancer patients and tracking the evolutionary trajectory of the disease from diagnosis through to relapse. The PEACE study accepts post-mortem tissue donation for comprehensive cancer research with the aim to benefit future patients.

More patients and samples

“We were impressed by the performance of SAGA’s technology and intrigued by the initial findings from our first research collaboration, and so we are very excited about expanding the study with more patients and samples,” says Professor Charles Swanton, FRS FRCP FMedSci, Chair, Personalised Cancer Medicine, University College London, Co-Director, CRUK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence, Senior Group Leader, Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute.

The analyses will be run in the SAGA Diagnostics central laboratory in Lund, Sweden.

Photo of UCL Cancer Institute designed by Grimshaw architects | Nicholas Grimshaw: Photo: Simon Ng/Flickr