Guangzhou-based AnchorDx and West China Hospital of Sichuan University have entered into a transfer agreement for their joint patent on methylation molecular markers for detecting benign and malignant pulmonary nodules. This collaboration aims to enhance the early diagnosis of lung cancer and improve the diagnostic rate of fiberoptic bronchoscopy.
Collaboration Background
The two parties initiated their collaboration in 2019, focusing on developing technologies and products for early lung cancer diagnosis based on DNA methylation markers. This effort seeks to address the limitations of fiberoptic bronchoscopy, which has an average diagnostic rate of only 31% for lung cancer detection.
Technical Achievements
Through their joint research, AnchorDx and West China Hospital have identified 11 lung cancer-specific methylation molecular markers involving 7 genes. These markers can be used to differentiate between benign and malignant lung nodules. A classification model built using five preferred methylation markers demonstrated exceptional performance in testing and validation sets, with an AUC of 0.93 in the test set (128 samples), sensitivity of 82%, and specificity of 91%. In head-to-head studies, the overall performance of this model surpasses that of other similar products in China.
Product Development
Based on these results, the collaboration has developed PulmoPath (Fei Ankang), a product designed for the early diagnosis of lung cancer. It is suitable for use with bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) obtained by fiberoptic bronchoscopy and lung biopsy tissue, offering a significant advancement in the field of lung cancer diagnostics.-Fineline Info & Tech
