Trovagene has partnered with the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and the Northwestern Medicine Developmental Therapeutics Institute (NMDTI) to conduct a translational research program designed to assess the utility of Trovagene's urine-based cell-free oncogene mutation monitoring technology in clinical practice.

The Lurie Cancer Center and NMDTI will work with Trovagene on clinical protocols that incorporate oncogene mutation monitoring during the course of cancer treatment and will assess the impact on overall disease management and patient outcomes.

"The Lurie Cancer Center is focused on advancing personalized medicine through collaborations with developers of state-of-the-art genomic technologies, such as Trovagene, to facilitate clinical decision making and improve patient care," said Leonidas C. Platanias, M.D., Ph.D., interim director of the Lurie Cancer Center.

"We are excited about the increasing opportunities to tailor cancer treatment to the specific genetic abnormalities that drive disease, and…we are dedicated to the rapid integration of technologies that will make patient-specific therapy an affordable reality," said Francis J. Giles, M.D., associate director for Translational Medicine and Developmental Therapeutics at the Lurie Cancer Center and director of the NMDTI.

Trovagene is engaged in clinical collaborations with academic institutions and integrated healthcare networks to demonstrate the clinical utility of its precision cancer monitoring platform for the detection of oncogene mutations, and the assessment of tumor dynamics and treatment response over time. The company is focused on expanding the clinical evidence to support broad market adoption of its molecular diagnostic platform and to generate health economic data necessary to establish favorable reimbursement. Trovagene's precision cancer monitoring platform can detect cell-free DNA mutations in urine and provide physicians with a whole-body molecular view of the patient in order to determine mutational status, guide treatment selection and to monitor disease progression over time.