OGT Presents the Latest in Tumour Screening at BSGM

Oxford Gene Technology (OGT) is inviting attendees of the British Society for Genetic Medicine (BSGM) annual conference to its seminar entitled ‘Approaches to tumour screening and therapy stratification: case studies in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer’ on Monday 22 September, 13.10–13.50, room 2N.

The conference will take place in Liverpool, UK on 22–24th September and the OGT seminar will include workshops from guest speakers Dr Michael Davies, University of Liverpool Cancer Research Centre and Dr Manisha Maurya, Centre for Molecular Pathology, Royal Marsden Hospital NHS Trust/Institute of Cancer Research.

As the future of cancer treatment is likely to rely on personalised therapy, screening multiple biomarkers to identify targeted therapies will become increasingly important. In the workshop titled ‘Application of the SureSeq Solid Tumour Panel to a panel of FFPE (formalin fixed, paraffin embedded) samples of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer from the Liverpool Lung Project’, Dr Davies will discuss the use of OGT’s targeted sequencing panel for screening multiple cancer biomarkers in clinical research laboratories. The SureSeq Solid Tumour panel encompasses all coding exons of 60 cancer associated genes and has been successfully used to accurately identify mutations across a panel of adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma samples. In addition, Dr Davies will present a poster at the event which details a validation of the panel in more than 300 clinical research samples, including lung, ovarian, head and neck, oesophageal, pancreatic and sarcoma cancers.

Dr Maurya will also discuss the use of the company’s products in lung cancer, focusing on newly acquired Cytocell fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) probes. Her workshop titled ‘ALK FISH testing in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer’ describes FISH as the gold standard for testing the Anaplastic Lymphoma Receptor Tyrosine Kinase (ALK) gene, rearrangements of which are present in 4% of non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC). As NSCLC can be classified into different molecular subtypes, accurate genomic identification of the correct subtype is of paramount importance for targeted treatment; such accuracy is achievable with the Cytocell Aquarius ALK Breakapart FISH probe.