July 2024- Myriad Genetics announced that they have agreed to cross-license patent estates covering tumor-informed approaches to detect minimal residual disease (MRD). The agreement helps solidify each company’s freedom to operate in the MRD market and broadens patient access to the benefits of MRD testing.

MRD tests, blood-based diagnostic tools, enable clinicians to monitor therapeutic responses to cancer treatment more closely than traditional cancer detection technologies, such as imaging, and detect cancer recurrence earlier. While MRD testing is nascent, its adoption rate is growing quickly, and the market size is expected to mature to $20 billion over the next several years.

Personalis and Myriad are each pioneering tumor-informed, genome-scale approaches to power ultra-sensitive MRD tests, enabling earlier cancer recurrence detection and more refined therapy monitoring than alternative approaches.

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“Myriad and Personalis are each working to re-define the standard for MRD testing and increasing market access to better inform clinical decision making for the treatment and monitoring of oncology patients,” said Paul J. Diaz, President and CEO, Myriad Genetics. “We believe that our unique sets of capabilities and inclusive approach to using intellectual property for the benefit of patients will help drive broader MRD testing adoption, reimbursement, and greatly advance this opportunity for patients in this emerging and under-penetrated market.”

“Personalis has presented compelling clinical evidence across large lung cancer, breast cancer, and immunotherapy cohorts demonstrating the ability of its NeXT Personal® whole-genome-based MRD platform to drive a leap in performance for patients,” said Chris Hall, CEO of Personalis. “We are excited to deepen our collaboration with Myriad by recognizing the importance of our respective patent estates in the field.”