Prometheus Laboratories, a specialty pharmaceutical and diagnostic company, has entered into an oncology-focused mutational analysis services agreement with Bayer Schering Pharma, Germany.
Under the terms of this agreement, Bayer will provide clinical samples, sourced from clinical studies, and Prometheus will perform mutational analyses that characterise the presence or absence of existing and novel cancer-relevant mutations in these samples.
Prometheus will be compensated based on the number and complexity of mutational analyses it completes for Bayer.
The addition of this mutational analysis services agreement broadens Bayer’s oncology-focused molecular and pathway activation profiling collaboration with Prometheus to include comprehensive mutational analyses.
The expanded information derived from this agreement has the potential to improve patient stratification in clinical studies and accelerate the development of novel oncology diagnostic and therapeutic products.
Prometheus and Bayer entered into a research collaboration and license agreement in March this year.
The collaboration partners Prometheus’ proprietary oncology diagnostic CEER platform with Bayer’s broad oncology pipeline with the objective of stratifying patients to appropriate drug candidates and accelerating the development and market introduction of novel oncology therapeutic and diagnostic products.
Using functional pathway analysis, based on Prometheus’ CEER platform, promises to enable a comprehensive understanding of tumors leading to improved patient stratification in clinical studies and improved utility and efficacy of targeted cancer therapeutics.
Prometheus president and CEO Joseph Limber said the combination of their mutational analysis and CEER platforms that this agreement represents is an important step to providing a more comprehensive analysis to Bayer, that may result in improved selection of patients who will benefit the most from specific drug candidates Bayer is developing.