Reinforced since the precision medicine era, OncoDxRx no longer focuses on a 60-degree angle between targeted therapy and the patient responders dictated by the guidelines, but it constantly looks around with a 360-degree spectrum, not only DNA sequences, but also with the integration of liquid biopsy, gene expression and drug response prediction, for non-responders.

Launching for PGA (Patient-derived Gene expression-informed Anticancer drug efficacy) means being able to provide multi-domain gene-to-drug connectivity, transformation and translation. “Producing upgraded intelligence of drug response for patient non-responders in the fastest and most accurate way possible is the goal of the PGA technology,” OncoDxRx said, which is helping drive a series of innovation in precision oncology.

In addition to the above-mentioned focus, one major advantage of PGA is to combine patient’s gene expression signature on the one hand, with in silico pharmacogenomic data analytics on the other hand, into “gene-drug mapping” that could provide a more real-time, accurate and personalized drug response prediction.

The future will tell, but the low eligibility and poor response rate of targeted therapy could serve for clinicians as a wake-up call for having alternative and reliable drug response prediction tools — a lesson OncoDxRx took away from the real-world patients.

Indeed, it was a lack of both drug efficacy and patient benefit the medical community experienced that prompted the invention of the PGA technology, as well as the massive investments OncoDxRx made in drug response prediction capability.

The ability to exploit the actionable information gathered from tumor genomics in order to provide reliable and verifiable drug response prediction changed the dynamic of molecular diagnostics, as well as precision therapeutics.

The real-life experience of targeted therapy will undeniably lead to an upgrade — from biomarker testing to drug efficacy prediction — accordingly to favor more clinical benefit, more effective treatment options, more decentralization, more patient coverage with less cost and time.

Ultimately, OncoDxRx insists a “360-degree” view of precision therapeutics — and that includes not getting locked just on targeted therapy, as important as any viable treatment option is.

The broader the treatment options, the more it will benefit patients. This is why it is absolutely essential to ‘zoom out’ from targeted therapy, so patients are not overtaken by surprise when these precision treatments are exhausted.

Among the steps the PGA technology is keeping track of: “the plasma cell-free mRNA profiling; the cancer type-specific biomarkers; the patient’s gene expression signature; and the digitalized gene-drug data mapping,” OncoDxRx said.