CellCarta and Pillar Biosciences are launching a global, multi-year strategic partnership to broaden access to next-generation sequencing (NGS) tumor profiling. The two companies say the fast, and streamlined services will be available to biopharma sponsors and clinical research partners alike.

CellCarta is a global precision medicine lab services provider for drug development; Pillar Biosciences specializes in NGS-based oncology molecular diagnostics.

Pitfalls in the Tumor Profiling Process

Oncology drug development is increasingly biomarker-driven, according to the companies. As such, sponsors need to enroll faster, yet do so on tighter budgets—all as trial designs split into subgroups.

Given that default testing strategies may rely on broader panels, time and resources are crunched when studies are more fit-for-purpose.

CellCarta and Pillar’s partnership aims to loosen that bottleneck by leveraging the latter’s portfolio of NGS-based kitted panels (oncoReveal). Crossing that with CellCarta’s expertise in global clinical trial testing execution, sponsors can right-size molecular testing to particular study objectives.

Pillar and CellCarta Execs React

Dan Harma, Pillar Biosciences Chief Commercial Officer, said the panels were designed to “make high-value tumor profiling more operationally accessible.”

Harma said the partnership creates a “trusted global laboratory network [to] help sponsors deploy testing strategies that match today’s realities.”

CellCarta Senior Vice President of Genomics Robin Grimwood agreed.

“Biomarker-driven oncology trials demand testing strategies that are both operationally efficient and aligned with long-term development goals,” Grimwood said. “This collaboration enables us to offer highly targeted, indication-specific panels for prospective testing, with the flexibility to develop custom panels.”

Ultimately, say CellCarta and Pillar, their partnership will encourage a reduction in hands-on complexity. It also aims to deliver on consistent performance expectations, and faster sample-to-report execution.