iCellate enters partnership with RCC Stockholm-Gotland

Stockholm 18 dec 2017 – iCellate is proud to announce a partnership with RCC (Regionalt Cancer Centrum) Stockholm-Gotland. The partnership will begin at the Diagnostic Center at Danderyd with a collaboration on two new studies in two different important cohorts of patients who would benefit greatly from new and improved diagnostic modalities.

The first group is patients with CUP (cancer of unknown primary). This is a group of patients that debuts directly with metastasis and where it is hard, or impossible, to determine where their primary tumor is located. These patients will donate blood samples for three (3) new tests, circulating tumor cells (CTC), circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and germline DNA. The blood samples will be analyzed for inappropriate cells and prepared for genetic sequencing of tumor DNA. The endpoints of this study are to determine any pathogenic genetic variants, suggest the location of any primary tumor and to compare the merits of the CTC and ctDNA samples.

The second group of patients have diffuse but severe symptoms that can be caused by cancer but without either obvious primary tumor or metastases. Since the expectation of finding cancer in this group is much lower (since they may in fact suffer from other diagnoses than cancer), initially only detection of circulating tumor cells (CTC) will be performed. Genetic sequencing will be performed only on the tumor cell positive patients (the individuals where CTCs are found). The endpoint in this study is to determine the added diagnostic value of the CTC test for this group of patients.

“Thanks to the pioneering efforts of the RCC to spearhead new technology that may become the new diagnostic best practice can we now come closer to benefit patients in routine clinical practice. It is exactly these kinds of pilot projects in selected patient groups we need to demonstrate the utility to patients and to the healthcare system of the minimally invasive and highly informative liquid biopsy samples” says Christer Ericsson, CSO at iCellate Medical.