Ashion Analytics, a clinical laboratory of the Translational Genomics Research Institute, an affiliate of City of Hope, is now part of NCI’s MATCH program, which provides patients who have rare or difficult-to-treat cancers with access to unique clinical trials nationwide that might give them the best therapeutic treatments and outcomes.
Ashion is one of the nation’s few dozen institutes participating in MATCH—Molecular Analysis for Therapy CHoice.
Ashion screens cancer patients for all of the nearly 3 billion nucleotides, or letters, in human DNA, which includes more than 19,000 genes. Ashion accomplishes this by performing genomic sequencing—a molecular-level analysis of each patient’s entire genome. Ashion scientists then match each patient’s unique cancer to the best available cancer treatments.
Ashion uses a proprietary test called GEM ExTra, which covers all protein coding regions of DNA, and an analysis of all RNA.
Using GEM ExTra, Ashion sequences both the individual patient’s normal genome and the patient’s cancer genome. Then the two sets of genomic data are compared to find the gene changes, known as mutations, that are specific to the tumor and may be potentially driving that patient’s cancer.
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