Horizon Discovery and LGC to Develop Cancer Diagnostics

Horizon Discovery Group plc, a supplier of research tools for genomics research and the development of personalised medicines, and life sciences measurement and testing company LGC have been offered a joint research grant of £360,224 ($608,000 USD) by the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, of which Horizon will receive more than half of the funding. The grant, awarded under the Technology Strategy Board’s Collaborative Research and Development (CR&D) project ‘Improving Cell and Tissue Analysis for Stratified Medicine’ will fund the research and development of a portfolio of novel reference standard materials in order to serve a high need area of clinical diagnostics.  The program will establish methods and cross platform data sets to standardize existing ‘liquid biopsy’ genetic diagnostic tests, to determine test sensitivity, and to help drive the development of new more sensitive systems as well as training and proficiency testing schemes for pathology laboratories. 

Horizon will use its gene editing expertise and GENESIS™ platform (comprising rAAV, CRISPR/Cas9 and ZFN technologies) to precisely engineer cell lines carrying cancer genetic markers. These cell lines will be used to generate reference standard material including formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) cell blocks and genomic DNA (gDNA).  LGC, which is the UK’s designated National Measurement Institute (NMI) for chemical and bioanalytical measurement, is developing methods using digital PCR for accurate value assignment of reference materials, and will test the reference standard material produced by Horizon.  LGC is also developing these methods for highly accurate and sensitive detection of tumor DNA in the bloodstream.