South Korean liquid biopsy firm IMBdx said Thursday that it is expanding an ongoing collaboration with AstraZeneca under a project called PROSPER 2.0, which aims to improve access to targeted therapies for individuals with metastatic prostate cancer in markets outside the US.

Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

IMBdx offers a blood-based next-generation sequencing test called AlphaLiquid HRR, which analyzes circulating tumor DNA in plasma to detect alterations in 15 genes associated with homologous recombination repair. The assay is currently available in various countries including Ukraine, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Colombia, Mexico, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, the company said.

As part of the PROSPER 2.0 project, IMBdx and AstraZeneca are exploring ways to increase clinician and patient awareness of the availability and utility of ctDNA testing to guide the use of targeted therapies in advanced prostate cancer, and of the capabilities of the AlphaLiquid HRR ctDNA test in particular.

IMBdx said it has been developing the test for more than two years, including in a collaborative study with Seoul National University Hospital that provided HRR results for 92 percent of patients using blood samples and demonstrated high concordance with tissue biopsy results.

GenomeWeb, 2023