Heligenics Unveils A First-Of-Its-Kind Precision Prescription Test For Breast Cancer Therapeutics

Heligenics, a cutting-edge biotech company, announces a first-of-its-kind precision genetic test to select among drugs to treat breast cancer. There are multiple drugs available to treat breast cancer. Most patients become drug resistant, meaning that the cancer cells aren’t responding to the drug that is usually able to kill or weaken them.

Although many patients eventually die from acquiring resistance to a drug, there is no systematic approach to identifying the variants that cause target-derived drug resistance. There are over 10,000 potential mutations in a cancer gene and we have no idea which ones produce resistance.

Using proprietary GigaAssay technology, they can rapidly determine which of the 10,000s of mutants would make a breast cancer patient susceptible to a drug they would want to take. Heligenics also identifies which of these variants produced resistance to the drug. Heligenics has started with 3 breast cancer drugs called Tykerb™, Tukysa™, and Nerlynx™. This will transform analysis of biopsies to create a data-driven approach to treatment.

Dr. Jerome Rotter, a board member of Heligenics and Director of Translational Genomics and Population Sciences at the Lundquist Institute / Harbor-UCLA said, “This test is a great example of the future of personalized drug therapy.”