ArcherDX’s Personalized Cancer Monitoring Wins Breakthrough Status

ArcherDX Inc. has received Breakthrough Device Designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its Personalized Cancer Monitoring (PCM) technology, a bespoke, minimally-invasive, and highly-sensitive product intended for early-stage cancer treatment monitoring and recurrence surveillance. ArcherDX’s technology enables healthcare providers across community and academic care settings access to genomic information in their laboratory, saving critical time and allowing world-class, cost-effective care locally.
 
The goal of the Breakthrough Devices Program is to provide patients and health care providers with timely access to medical devices by speeding up their development, assessment, and review, while preserving standards, consistent with the FDA’s mission to protect and promote public health.
 
The program will provide ArcherDX with enhanced communication with the FDA regarding technology validation and clinical trial protocols and could expedite the review process.
 
Jason Myers, ArcherDX CEO and co-founder said, “Fewer than 1 percent of cancer patients receive any genomic profiling for the monitoring of their cancer. Millions of individuals who undergo cancer treatment and the millions more who survive and achieve remission, need a sensitive, personalized means of detecting relapse earlier. We believe our bespoke product can improve both therapy monitoring and recurrence surveillance and given the substantial need, we look forward to additional collaborative interaction with regulators to deliver our PCM product to patients as soon as possible.” 
 
As part of an on-going collaboration, TRACERx¹ investigators, led by Professor Charles Swanton, Group Leader, UCL and the Francis Crick Institute, and Dr. Christopher Abbosh, Principal Clinical Fellow, UCL, are utilizing ArcherDX’s technology to detect low-volume minimal residual disease at high levels of sensitivity to help achieve TRACERx’s goal of a more personalized approach to developing cancer treatments.
 
The PCM Breakthrough designation follows Breakthrough Device Designation for ArcherDX’s STRATAFIDE which, upon approval, would be the first pan-solid tumor device employing genomic sequencing testing technology to accept both tissue and blood that can be used in local hospital or regional reference laboratories.
 
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¹ *TRACERx (Tracking Cancer Evolution through therapy (Rx)) is the single biggest investment in lung cancer research by Cancer Research UK. Taking place over nine years, the translational research program is the first study to look at the evolution of cancer in real time and immense detail. Researchers follow patients with lung cancer all the way from diagnosis through to either disease relapse or cure after surgery, tracking and analyzing how their cancer develops. TRACERx is led by UCL (University College London) via the Cancer Research UK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence and also supported by the National Institute for Health Research, University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre, Francis Crick Institute and the Rosetrees Trust.