Personal Genome Diagnostics (PGDx) is teaming up with MolecularMD to market a suite of personalized medicine services to cancer researchers and drug developers. The collaboration is designed to provide a specialized service to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry that covers a range of genomic and clinical trial services used in clinical development and new drug R&D. Per the agreement, the two companies will co-market each other’s services to their pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers.

The firms say this collaboration combines PGDx’ expertise in next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based cancer biomarker discovery with MolecularMD’s capabilities in the development, validation, and delivery of cancer companion diagnostics. PGDx beefed up its strengths back in March when it licensed exclusive rights to digital karyotyping, a genome-mapping technology developed by the company’s founders at Johns Hopkins University that can reportedly identify large chromosomal changes in human cancer cells as well amplifications and deletions, including those in regions not previously known to have been altered. Also, just this past July, MolecularMD strengthened its diagnostic capabilities by obtaining exclusive patent rights to technology jointly owned by investigators at the Broad and Dana-Farber Cancer Institutes pertaining to DDR2 mutations for diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive uses in lung cancer.

“PGDx focuses on unbiased NGS-based approaches that are most relevant in the early stages of drug discovery and development, which complements MolecularMD’s capabilities in the development of companion diagnostics for specific cancer biomarkers,” said Antony Newton, CCO of PGDx, in a statement. “This collaboration will now enable the two companies to provide a complete spectrum of genomic services to drug developers.”

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