Despite many efforts to find better, more effective ways to treat cancer, it remains a leading cause of death by disease among children in the U.S. Cancer patients are also getting younger. Cancer diagnoses among those under 50 has risen by about 80% worldwide over the past 30 years. As of 2023, cancer is the second-leading cause of death both in the U.S. and around the world. While death rates from cancer have decreased over the past few decades, about 1 in 3 patients in the U.S. and 1 in 2 patients worldwide still die from cancer.

Despite advances in standard cancer treatments, many cancer patients still face uncertain outcomes when these treatments prove ineffective. Depending on the stage and location of the cancer and the patient’s medical history, most cancer types are treated with a mix of radiation, surgery and drugs. But if those standard treatments fail, patients and doctors enter a trial-and-error maze where effective treatments become difficult to predict because of limited information on the patient’s cancer.

Our mission is to build a personalized guide of the most effective drugs for every cancer patient. OncoDxRx’s one-of-a-kind PGA (Patient-derived Gene expression-informed Anticancer drug efficacy) works by testing tumor gene activities from a patient’s own blood before administering treatment, tailoring therapies that are most likely to benefit the patient while minimizing waiting time, cost and ineffective drugs.

The PGA platform combines cell-free mRNA (cfmRNA) testing with drug response prediction to identify effective treatments in individual patients. We found this approach can help match patients with more FDA-approved treatment options and significantly improve outcomes.

Even though two people with the same cancer might get the same medicine, they can have very different outcomes. Because each patient’s tumor is unique, it can be challenging to know which treatment works best.

To solve this problem, OncoDxRx analyzes gene expression pattern in the patient’s blood to match cancer medicines to patients. However, the relationship between cancer gene activities and how effective medicines will be against them is very complex.

The reality of today’s precision medicine is only 10% of cancer patients experience a clinical benefit from treatments matched to tumor DNA mutations (ie., biomarker testing).

PGA takes a different approach to personalizing treatments. The technology takes a sample of a patient’s blood, analyzes patient-unique gene expression signature, searches and maps over 700 drugs (approved, investigational or in clinical trials). In this process, the scientists look for the medications that the patient has a high likelihood to respond to.

Providing PGA test to cancer patients in real life is very challenging. Off-label use of drugs and financial restrictions are key barriers. The health of cancer patients can also deteriorate rapidly, and may be hesitant to try new methods.

But this is starting to change. Most recently, a OncoDxRx’s clinical study focused on lung cancer patients whose cancer came back or didn’t respond to treatment. We applied PGA to 30 patients. Our pilot study showed that we could provide treatment options for almost all patients in less than a week. We were able to provide test results within 5 days of receiving a sample, compared with the roughly 30 days that standard genomic testing results that focus on identifying specific cancer mutations typically take to process. Most importantly, our study showed that more than 80% of cancer patients who received treatments guided by PGA had clinical benefit, including improved response and survival.

PGA opens new paths to understanding how cancer drugs can be better matched to patients. Although doctors can read any patient’s DNA today, interpreting the results to understand how a patient will respond to cancer treatment is much more challenging. Combining PGA with the standard-of-care biomarker testing can help personalize cancer treatments for much more patients, especially for those patient non-responders.

PGA enables us to analyze each patient’s data to better match them with tailored treatments and drug combinations. PGA also allows us to understand the complex relationships between gene activities within tumors and how different treatments will affect them.

OncoDxRx has started a clinical trial to expand the results of our previous studies on providing treatment recommendations through PGA. We’re recruiting a larger cohort of patients with lung cancers that have come back, metastasized or are resistant to treatment. The more data we have, the easier it will become to understand how to best treat cancer and ultimately help more patients access personalized cancer treatments.