Roche has acquired CAPP Medical, a genomics research company founded by Stanford University oncologists and located in Palo Alto, Calif., to advance the development of technology for cancer screening and monitoring through the detection of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in blood.

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 Roland Diggelmann, chief operating officer, Roche Diagnostics. "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."