Qiagen to acquire stake in Alacris

Qiagen has acquired a strategic stake in Alacris Theranostics GmbH, a German start-up company using novel technologies to develop individualised cancer treatment strategies based on a patient’s genomic profile. The company has also acquired an exclusive option to access all biomarkers emerging from this discovery program.

Alacris, founded by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (MPI-MG) in Berlin and Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, USA, uses a proprietary modelling system developed at MPI-MG and exclusively licensed to Alacris Theranostics to analyse clinical sample data based on next-generation and other whole genome sequencing technologies.

This system, called ModCell, addresses a critical bottleneck in the development of personalised healthcare solutions. It allows users to identify and select from vast amounts of genetic data such markers that can prove useful to guide treatment decisions for patients. The technology can also be used to create marker subsets to stratify potential patient populations for R&D trials involving medicines in clinical development. These marker selections can be formatted into real-time PCR-based assays that Qiagen can commercialise within its pharmaceutical development assay portfolio or its therascreen molecular diagnostics portfolio for use on its new QIAsymphony RGQ platform.

The collaboration brings together developing molecular diagnostic and testing solutions in pharmaceutical development and personalised healthcare with genomic data generation and mining capabilities and preferential access to large and well-characterised clinical sample sets.

The genome-based approach opens new perspectives for personalised cancer treatments as it enables the reliable assessment of treatment outcomes with various combinations of drugs by not only detecting mutations in individual genes but by analysing the entire mutation spectrum of all genes involved in the disease.