AI genomics company Freenome announced a partnership with proteomics firm Biognosys in order to enhance its broad-signal approach to early-cancer detection and precision oncology.
By decoding cell-free (cf) biomarker patterns of a once unthinkable complexity, Freenome ‘s artificial intelligence genomics platform is poised to detect cancer at its earliest stages and help clinicians optimize the next generation of precision therapies, the company explained in a press release. At the molecular level, the existence of circulating fragments of tumor DNA (ctDNA) in the blood is well established. However, due to statistical, biologic, and economic limitations, ctDNA has been shown to be an unreliable stand-alone biomarker for early-cancer screening.
Freenome’s AI genomics platform looks beyond tumor DNA to analyze the body’s own response to cancer—the fragments of cfDNA and cfRNA that are released into the bloodstream when the presence of cancer leads to the destruction of immune and other cells in the tumor environment. Partnering with Biognosys enhances Freenome’s multi-analyte, broad-signal approach by adding protein quantification of exceptional depth and precision in the development of its first commercially available screening test.
“Changes in protein expression can be either direct or surrogate markers for emerging disease processes in the body. Working with Biognosys gives us a distinct and complementary type of information to use alongside our genomic sequencing data, which in turn may improve the performance of our tests,” said Imran Haque, chief scientific officer at Freenome.
