Prognostic tests

Almac are committed to developing a range of prognostic tests for some of the most common types of cancer.

Many patients with early cancer are cured by surgery alone, however a significant number of patients who receive only surgery will have recurrence of the disease and require adjuvant treatment. The goal of a prognostic test is to identify those patients at risk of recurrence, those who should receive additional treatment and additionally reduce the number of patients who receive unnecessary treatment.

Our Stage II colorectal cancer test

One of the tests currently in our pipeline is a prognostic signature for stage II colorectal cancer, which affects around 180,000 people in Europe and US each year. The development of reliable prognostics tests is an important step in the development of truly personalised healthcare. There is currently no way of identifying those who are at high risk of recurrence and who may benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy, however we have generated prognostic signatures from pilot studies which can correctly identify high risk individuals and are currently developing a gene signature from the pilot study.

Our approach:

We will work with you to identify the relevant variables and to aid in the correct design of your study or clinical trial.
We will create a training and test set in order to generate a classifier.
We will identify the right platform to use for the study and carry out the profiling and bioinformatics.
This will then be validated on the independent test set, to determine the specificity, sensitivity and negative and positive predictive values.
Based on this, we can move forward with the development of a test, suitable for regulatory approval.