Cartagenia, CollabRx partner to provide pathology laboratories and cancer centers access to personalized information on therapeutic options

The partnership provides clinical and pathology laboratories that have adopted Cartagenia’s Bench for Oncology software platform for their genetic sequencing analysis and reporting workflow with the option to access to CollabRx’s highly-credible medical and scientific knowledge which they can integrate with their own proprietary information to draft physician ready reports.

"Cartagenia has developed an industry leading software platform that has been adopted by leading clinical laboratories that value automation in report generation in combination with tools that allow them to access, review and validate high quality knowledge to support the interpretation of results of NGS-based tests in cancer," said Thomas Mika, Chairman, President and CEO of CollabRx.

"We are excited to partner with Cartagenia to provide a robust, integrated medical informatics solution to the clinical laboratory market in the U.S. and Europe."

The new capability provided by the two companies allows clinical laboratories to keep up with the scale and pace of change in medical and scientific knowledge associated with NGS cancer panels, and gives labs the ability to use this knowledge to support physicians in patient treatment planning by providing clear and easy to understand reports that associate genetic alterations with therapy options.

Under the terms of the agreement, CollabRx’s Genetic Variant Annotation (GVA) Service™ will be made accessible through Cartagenia’s Bench for Oncology software platform. CollabRx and Cartagenia will promote the partnership by cooperating on marketing initiatives to inform customers of the benefits and advantages of the joint use of each company’s products.

To enable this partnership, Cartagenia has created the infrastructure necessary to integrate a lab’s curated internal knowledge with external information. The Bench for Oncology platform provides a robust infrastructure for labs to manage their proprietary knowledge, knowledge from commercial databases and services, various publicly available resources, and information shared between collaborating labs.

Herman Verrelst, Cartagenia’s CEO, states: "The oncology field is moving rapidly towards personalized medicine and genetic analysis is playing an important role as a means of understanding a patient’s unique cancer. We believe in the value of complementing the lab’s internal knowledge base and publicly available resources with professionally curated content. This way, our software solutions can help labs assess the genetic profile of a patient’s cancer to allow clinicians and lab directors to determine how it might respond to various treatments."

Steven Van Vooren, one of Cartagenia’s scientific founders, noted that CollabRx scientists and physicians, along with their large network of clinical advisors, have carefully curated and annotated medical genomics knowledge to create a robust database that supports decision making by physicians who are analyzing a tumor’s genetic profile to optimize a treatment plan for their cancer patients.

"This careful consideration is necessary given the complexity and fast-changing nature of medical and scientific research in cancer genomics," Van Vooren said. "We are very excited to work with CollabRx to enable clinical laboratories to access the CollabRx GVA Service through Cartagenia’s Bench for Oncology software platform."

Cartagenia will be showcasing the availability of CollabRx’s services through the Bench for Oncology software platform at the upcoming Association for Molecular Pathology annual meeting, AMP 2014, on Nov. 12-15 at Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, National Harbor, MD. CollabRx and Cartagenia representatives will be available to discuss this partnership at the AMP meeting.