Guardant to pick up epigenome gumshoe Bellwether Bio for its early cancer detection work

Guardant Health has moved to acquire Bellwether Bio, a two-year-old University of Washington spinout focused on early cancer diagnostics that tap into the epigenomics of cell-free DNA.

The deal is expected to close this April, with the Bellwether team being absorbed into Guardant to work on its early detection pipeline. This includes its co-founder, Jay Shendure, as a scientific advisor. Financial details were not disclosed.

Shendure is a professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington, whose Howard Hughes Medical Institute-affiliated lab works on nucleosome positioning within the DNA sequence, as well as fragmentomics—the sequencing of short pieces of DNA found circulating in the bloodstream.

By searching those fragments for clues left by various transcription factors, the researchers were able to trace them back to the type of cell that built them: in this case, proof of the presence of cancer. The work was the subject of a 2016 paper in Cell co-authored with Bellwether’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Matthew Snyder.

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“Our early research has shown the strong potential impact of incorporating biologically-relevant epigenomic information on the clinical performance of blood tests for early-stage cancer detection,” Guardant co-founder and President AmirAli Talasaz said in a statement.

At the top of the year, during the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Guardant launched its Lunar liquid biopsy test focused on detecting cancer in its early stages, examining both genomic alterations and epigenomic signatures, such as DNA methylation.

The Lunar assay is designed for studies that screen for tumor DNA in the bloodstream and assign an adjuvant therapy or monitor for treatment responses and recurrence. It was based on samples gathered from more than 80,000 cancer patients tested with the company’s Guardant360 test, alongside additional whole-genome sequencing data.

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More recently, Guardant’s lung cancer blood test demonstrated it could do more than hold its own against standard tissue-based biopsies, delivering results faster and with more accuracy—which the company said makes the case for it to be used first in all newly diagnosed patients.