Using genetics to discover life-changing biologic medicines
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Clinical Diagnostics
We empower clinical diagnostic labs to unlock the answers
In current clinical oncology practice, genetic testing is used for diagnosis and treatment. This is enabled because routinely observed variants with known impact guide therapeutic choices. However, quite often, when a variant is unknown, called a Variant of Unknown Significance (VUS), no diagnosis or tailoring of therapy to the patient’s individual tumor profile is ascertained. Heligenics help solve this problem with its mutation effects on gene activity maps, providing clinical diagnostic solutions by empowering companies to test more than 10,000 variants in a coding and promoter region of a target gene. The same libraries are also used for companion diagnostics and whole gene biomarkers.
What if the unknown could become known, how could that affect patient treatment?
For the interpretation of genetic variants in diagnostic testing, Heligenics eliminates the vast number of VUSs. Heligenics comprehensively measure the significance of VUSs, thereby increasing the accuracy and diagnostic yield of a genetic test.
Through our massively parallel in vivo process using the GigaAssay™ technology, Heligenics produces what we call a MEGA-Map™. Each MEGA-Map measures the impact of all possible amino acid substitutions in the functional target protein. For example, one isoform of BRCA1 has 1,816 amino acids, and each position could be substituted with a VUS encoding any of the 19 other amino acids.
To individually test each amino acid substitution by other approaches would be impractical. Clients can expand their genetic test offering beyond single substitutions in coding regions, by measuring the impact of nucleotide substitutions in 5’ promoter regions, 3’ untranslated regions, and even double single nucleotide variants as grouped haplotypes.
Companion diagnostics are important for connecting cancer patients with targeted therapies. Heligenics offers a MEGA-Map™ in the presence and absence of drugs to identify all resistance mutations in a gene to create more accuracy for companion diagnostics.
Our Clinical Diagnostic Solutions
