[Massachusetts General Hospital] (MGH) has signed a five-year, $30 million deal with Johnson & Johnson's cancer diagnostic device unit Janssen Diagnostics LLC to develop a third-generation microfluidics-based system for capturing and analyzing circulating tumor cells (CTCs). [See Deal] The program will be jointly managed at J&J by Veridex and Janssen R&D LLC's Ortho Biotech Oncology Research & Development (OB-ORD) as part of a two-year-old drug-device convergence initiative within J&J. The collaboration aims to develop and obtain regulatory approvals for a standardized diagnostic platform that will be able to conduct biomarker analysis on DNA, RNA, or protein from tumor cells collected noninvasively – and presumably collected repeatedly during the course of cancer therapy.
Veridex currently sells a system, CellSearch, which counts CTCs in a blood sample, for use in cancer prognosis. But CellSearch has only a rudimentary capability for analyzing molecular abnormalities of tumor cells