Roche has announced that it has acquired CAPP Medical to advance the development of technology for cancer screening and monitoring through the detection of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in blood. CAPP Medical is a genomics research company founded by Stanford University oncologists and industry veterans.

CAPP Medical's novel technology is designed to isolate and quantify small amounts of ctDNA through a simple blood draw, which has the potential to be used for cancer therapy selection and monitoring tumor response and resistance to therapy.

"Roche believes focused and high quality next generation sequencing (NGS) assays using simple blood draws have the potential to significantly advance the time of cancer diagnosis and change routine cancer diagnostic monitoring and may be highly cost effective compared to today's current standard of using PET and CT imaging to monitor tumor progression," said Mr Roland Diggelmann, COO, Roche Diagnostics. He added, "CAPP Medical's technology for detecting the circulating cancer DNA from blood has the potential to further strengthen Roche's diagnostic offerings for patients and will provide valuable clinical trial support for Pharma oncology pipelines."

"This acquisition highlights Roche's commitment to advancing cancer testing. We strongly believe Roche is the best suited company to advance this technology and bring it to its full potential," said Mr Ashok Krishnamurthi, CEO of CAPP Medical.