Swiss pharma company Roche has launched a genomic profiling kit, jointly-developed with Foundation Medicine, in a bid to expand access to personalised cancer research.

The Avenio Tumor Tissue Comprehensive Genomic Profiling (CGP) Kit complements Roche and Foundation Medicine’s current CGP portfolio, and will allow laboratories to expand their in-house oncology research.

This kit uses a gene panel based on the FoundationOne platform, which is designed to match the FoundationOne Cdx panel content to analyse 324 cancer-related genes across four main classes of genomic alterations and signatures known to cause cancer.

“To treat cancer effectively, we must understand what drives it at a molecular level. CGP helps inform decisions about available treatment options, including targeted therapies, immunotherapies, tumour-agnostic treatments and clinical trial participation, based on the unique genomic profile of a patient’s tumour,” said Thomas Schinecker, CEO of Roche Diagnostics.

“We are bringing powerful insights from CGP to enable smarter, more efficient research and development. Our new kit provides the information researchers need and will ultimately provide insights physicians can use to develop personalised treatment strategies for individual patients,” he added.

The kit is set to launch in Europe, North America, Asia and South America. Roche and Foundation Medicine are also planning to develop additional solutions for its CGP portfolio.