Cartagenia Partners with CollabRx to Provide Pathology Laboratories and Cancer Centers Access to Personalized Information on Therapeutic Options

BOSTON, and LEUVEN, Belgium, Nov. 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Cartagenia, leader in providing genetic labs and clinicians with software-based workflow support for variant assessment, lab reporting, and access of relevant knowledge-bases, today announced a partnership with CollabRx that will provide Cartagenia's customers access to CollabRx's industry-leading treatment information resources and services.

The partnership provides clinical and pathology laboratories that have adopted Cartagenia's Bench for Oncology software platform for their genetic sequencing analysis and reporting workflow with the option to access to CollabRx's highly-credible medical and scientific knowledge which they can integrate with their own proprietary information to draft physician ready reports.

"Cartagenia has developed an industry leading software platform that has been adopted by leading clinical laboratories that value automation in report generation in combination with tools that allow them to access, review and validate high quality knowledge to support the interpretation of results of NGS-based tests in cancer," said Thomas Mika, Chairman, President and CEO of CollabRx.  "We are excited to partner with Cartagenia to provide a robust, integrated medical informatics solution to the clinical laboratory market in the U.S. and Europe."

The new capability provided by the two companies allows clinical laboratories to keep up with the scale and pace of change in medical and scientific knowledge associated with NGS cancer panels, and gives labs the ability to use this knowledge to support physicians in patient treatment planning by providing clear and easy to understand reports that associate genetic alterations with therapy options.

Under the terms of the agreement, CollabRx's Genetic Variant Annotation (GVA) Service™ will be made accessible through Cartagenia's Bench for Oncology software platform.  CollabRx and Cartagenia will promote the partnership by cooperating on marketing initiatives to inform customers of the benefits and advantages of the joint use of each company's products.

Knowledge integration platform

To enable this partnership, Cartagenia has created the infrastructure necessary to integrate a lab's curated internal knowledge with external information. The Bench for Oncology platform provides a robust infrastructure for labs to manage their proprietary knowledge, knowledge from commercial databases and services, various publicly available resources, and information shared between collaborating labs.

Herman Verrelst, Cartagenia's CEO, states:  "The oncology field is moving rapidly towards personalized medicine and genetic analysis is playing an important role as a means of understanding a patient's unique cancer. We believe in the value of complementing the lab's internal knowledge base and publicly available resources with professionally curated content. This way, our software solutions can help labs assess the genetic profile of a patient's cancer to allow clinicians and lab directors to determine how it might respond to various treatments."

Steven Van Vooren, one of Cartagenia's scientific founders, noted that CollabRx scientists and physicians, along with their large network of clinical advisors, have carefully curated and annotated medical genomics knowledge to create a robust database that supports decision making by physicians who are analyzing a tumor's genetic profile to optimize a treatment plan for their cancer patients.

"This careful consideration is necessary given the complexity and fast-changing nature of medical and scientific research in cancer genomics," Van Vooren said. "We are very excited to work with CollabRx to enable clinical laboratories to access the CollabRx GVA Service through Cartagenia's Bench for Oncology software platform."

Cartagenia will be showcasing the availability of CollabRx's services through the Bench for Oncology software platform at the upcoming Association for Molecular Pathology annual meeting, AMP 2014, on Nov. 12-15 at Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, National Harbor, MD. CollabRx and Cartagenia representatives will be available to discuss this partnership at the AMP meeting.

About Cartagenia

Cartagenia supplies diagnostic support software, database systems, and related services to genetic labs, pathology labs and clinicians, enabling them to perform clinically relevant genetic analyses quickly and efficiently, and offer patients and carers high-quality genetic interpretation and counselling.

Cartagenia Bench Lab allows automation of variant assessment protocols and lab report generation for structural and molecular variant assays such as Arrays, Sanger and Next Generation Sequencing. It supports communication with referring physicians, allows labs and clinicians to put variants in their clinical context, and supports confident data sharing.

The Cartagenia Bench platform is built in collaboration with genetics labs and clinical experts involved in routine medical practice. Because of this, Bench Lab addresses the specific needs of genetic diagnostic labs and clinicians.

Cartagenia Bench is built using a certified ISO13485 Quality Management System and is registered with the FDA as an exempt Class I Medical Device in the United States and as a Class I Medical Device in Europe in conformity with the essential requirements and provisions of the Council Directive 93/42/EEC concerning medical devices, and with the relevant harmonized standards EN ISO62304.

www.cartagenia.com

About CollabRx

CollabRx, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLRX) is a recognized leader in cloud-based expert systems to inform healthcare decision-making. CollabRx uses information technology to aggregate and contextualize the world's knowledge on genomics-based medicine with specific insights from the nation's top cancer experts, starting with the area of greatest need: advanced cancers in patients who have effectively exhausted the standard of care. More information may be obtained at http://www.collabrx.com.

About the CollabRx GVA Service

The GVA Service offered by CollabRx is a widely used, highly scalable, and cloud-based electronic decision support system that provides a turn-key analysis of many types of genetic alterations in cancer. The GVA Service accepts genetic data from any source or platform and pairs it with information contained in a knowledge base that includes the clinical impact of specific genetic profiles. The CollabRx knowledge base is supported by a proprietary technology platform and expert system that leverages a large and growing network of over 75 thought-leaders and clinical practitioners in the United States and Europe who work together with CollabRx to develop new tools for clinical decision-making in oncology. The GVA Service is offered to customers in a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model.

Contact:

CARTAGENIA
Herman Verrelst
CEO Cartagenia
Technologielaan 3
3001 Leuven
T : +32 16 40 40 66
E : [email protected]
www.cartagenia.com

CollabRx 
Gavin J. Gordon, MBA, PhD
Vice President of Business Development & Strategic Alliances
CollabRx, Inc.
E : [email protected] 
T : +1 415-248-5350
www.collabrx.com

Allen & Caron
Len Hall
VP Media Relations
T : 1 949 474 4300
E : [email protected]  
www.allencaron.com

SOURCE Cartagenia