CelLBxHealth Partners with Royal Marsden to Enhance Lung Cancer Treatment Through CTC-DNA Analysis
Key Insights
CelLBxHealth (search) and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust will conduct a clinical study in 200 patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer to evaluate CTC-DNA profiling for treatment guidance.
The study targets the 10-15% of patients whose standard circulating tumor DNA tests return uninformative results, potentially expanding targeted therapy options.
Results are expected by year's end, with the research aiming to identify actionable mutations that conventional ctDNA testing misses.
CTC intelligence company CelLBxHealth (search) has announced a research collaboration with The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust to evaluate a novel blood-based testing approach that could expand treatment options for advanced lung cancer patients whose standard genetic testing fails to identify actionable mutations.
The two organizations will jointly conduct a translational clinical study in 200 patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease. The study will be integrated into existing research on circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) testing from blood samples.
Addressing Uninformative ctDNA Results
The research specifically targets the 10-15% of patients whose ctDNA blood tests return uninformative results, meaning they fail to identify actionable genetic mutations that could guide treatment decisions. For these patients, CelLBxHealth (search) will analyze DNA extracted from circulating tumor cells (CTCs) - cancer cells that shed into the bloodstream - to search for mutations that standard ctDNA testing misses.
This approach is supported by previous studies demonstrating that CTC DNA can reveal additional actionable mutations beyond what conventional ctDNA analysis detects.
Study Objectives and Leadership
The primary goal is to identify genetic alterations that could make patients eligible for targeted therapies they might otherwise not receive. Secondary objectives include evaluating how closely CTC-DNA analysis aligns with tumor tissue profiling and determining whether combining both approaches improves the overall detection of clinically relevant genomic mutations.
The project will be jointly led by Dr. Lavanya Sivapalan, Head of R&D at CelLBxHealth (search), and Professor Michael Hubank, Scientific Director of the Clinical Genomics Service at The Royal Marsden.
Clinical Impact and Timeline
Results of the study are anticipated by year's end, with all anonymized data generated during the research to be shared between both parties to support joint analysis and translational insights.
Peter Collins, CEO of CelLBxHealth (search), emphasized the collaboration's potential impact: "This collaboration with The Royal Marsden represents a great opportunity to deliver precision oncology for a significant number of NSCLC patients for whom standard of care tissue biopsy and ctDNA analysis is unable to identify genetic alterations that confer eligibility for a wide range of effective targeted therapies."
Collins added that by integrating a reflex to CTC-DNA analysis, the research aims to identify clinically actionable alterations and expand treatment options for this patient group. The partnership with The Royal Marsden, one of the world's largest cancer centers and a longstanding hub for oncology research and clinical innovation, provides an opportunity to evaluate this combined approach in a real-world clinical setting.