By Ron Shinkman, Editor, Laboratory Industry Report
Adaptive Biotechnologies has said it has developed an assay to help detect Hodgkin’s disease through a blood draw.
The Seattle-based Adaptive worked with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to develop the test, which focuses on identifying populations of B cells that can detect tumor-specific DNA sequences. Hodgkin’s disease is characterized by the presence of malignant Hodgkin Reed-Sternberg cells, which are derived from B cells. However, they had usually been in quantities too low to detect in non-molecular blood tests.
Typically, Hodgkin’s disease and other types of lymphoma are diagnosed through biopsies of lymph node tissue or radiography, which exposes the patient to radiation. Hodgkin’s has one of the highest five-year survival rates of any form of cancer, at around 85 percent.
Adaptive Biotechnologies performed the assay—which has about a one-week turnaround—via its clonoSeq testing platform, which it acquired from Sequenta earlier this year. The assay applies only to classical Hodgkin’s disease as opposed to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. "To my knowledge, this is the first clinical assay that has the potential to detect minimal residual disease in classical Hodgkin’s lymphoma," Yasuhiro Oki, M.D., an assistant Professor at the department of lymphoma and myeloma, said in a press release.
The findings were recently published in the British Journal of Haematology.
It is unknown when Adaptive will create a commercially viable test for Hodgkin’s disease.