VolitionRx, a life sciences company focused on developing blood-based diagnostic tests for a broad range of cancer types and other conditions, has signed an agreement to commence a pilot ovarian cancer study in collaboration with Singapore General Hospital (SGH). Blood and tissue samples collected from 40 patients will be assessed to establish the feasibility of VolitionRx’s proprietary NuQ assays in detecting ovarian cancer. If this test proves to be accurate, it could offer hope as an early-stage screening tool.
The collaboration with SGH will be VolitionRx’s first to focus solely on patients from an Asian ethnic background. The hospital will provide 20 matched blood and tissue samples from patients with ovarian cancer as well as blood samples from 20 healthy donors. The anonymized and blinded samples will be analyzed by VolitionRx’s team and will be the first matched tissue and blood samples to be assessed using its NuQ assays. On completion of the analyses, the data will be unblended, and together the parties will evaluate the performance of the test.
Other clinical trials assessing the effectiveness of Volition’s assays include:
- A 4,800-patient retrospective symptomatic population study in colorectal cancer at Hvidovre Hospital, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- A 14,000-patient prospective screening study in colorectal cancer at Hvidovre Hospital
- A 4,000-patient prospective study that involves patients with the 20 most prevalent cancers at University Hospital in Bonn, Germany
- A 600-patient prospective confirmatory study in lung cancer at University Hospital
- A 250-patient prospective study in colorectal cancer at CHU-UCL Mont Godinne Hospital, Belgium
- A retrospective study with MD Anderson, Texas, to establish the efficacy of VolitionRx’s NuQ tests to distinguish anaplastic prostate cancer from less aggressive castration-resistant prostate cancer.
- A prospective study with the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, to assess VolitionRx’s NuQ tests for the diagnosis of endometriosis.
