Saturday, February 16, 2019
Decipher Biosciences, a leader in the field of urologic cancer genomics, today announced a research collaboration with Dendreon Pharmaceuticals, a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company and pioneer in the development of immunotherapy, to apply genomic tumor profiling using the Decipher® assay and GRID® software to identify prostate cancer patients on active surveillance who may benefit most from treatment with sipuleucel-T. PROVENGE® (sipuleucel-T) was the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved immunotherapy made from a patient's own immune cells.
"We are pleased to work with Dendreon on this important research collaboration, which we believe will help accelerate the discovery and development of genomic solutions to aid in the treatment and management of prostate cancer," said Elai Davicioni, PhD, chief scientific officer of Decipher Biosciences. "Leveraging Decipher, GRID and machine learning to uncover novel predictors of treatment response will help realize our mutual goal of personalizing therapy for patients with prostate cancer."
As part of the agreement, Dendreon will provide Decipher Biosciences with tumor samples from its Phase 3 ProVent trial (NCT03686683), which will evaluate the effectiveness of sipuleucel-T in reducing disease progression in men with prostate cancer on active surveillance. Decipher Biosciences will use its whole transcriptome Decipher assay to assess the biological behavior of a patient's tumor and its GRID software and database to evaluate gene expression signatures that may be associated with sipuleucel-T response.
"More than 50,000 men choose active surveillance every year1, which includes regular monitoring to ensure the cancer is not growing or spreading, over more serious treatment options that can negatively impact quality of life," said Bruce A. Brown, M.D., chief medical officer at Dendreon. "It is our hypothesis that treating patients on AS with sipuleucel-T immunotherapy will enable more of them to stay in the AS cohort longer, perhaps indefinitely."
