TAMPA, Fla.-- Sept. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ M2GEN announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Discovery Life Sciences, a global leader in biospecimen solutions, genomic, cell, and immunohistochemistry (IHC) services, to provide M2GEN's recently launched oncology-focused bioinformatics support services.

Under the agreement, M2GEN will provide pipeline analyses for paired tumor/normal and tumor-only somatic mutation identification from Whole Exome Sequencing (WES), and gene expression and fusion detection from tumor RNA Sequencing (RNA-Seq).

M2GEN's bioinformatics analysis pipelines leverage results and interpretation gained from its cancer knowledge base including, ORIEN AVATAR®, a comprehensive ever-expanding clinico-genomic database. M2GEN's Bioinfomatics Support Services key differentiators include applying one of the largest Panel of Normals (PoN) available for high-quality somatic mutation calling. Over 20,000 germline samples from cancer patients with a wide range of oncology diagnoses inform the segregation of somatic and germline variants, and identify recurrent sequencing artifacts. In addition, germline data from ORIEN AVATAR® patients are leveraged as a Virtual Normal (VN) cohort during tumor-only analysis, allowing for superior somatic mutation classification when patients' matched normal biospecimens are unavailable.

Over the last four years, M2GEN and Discovery Life Sciences have collaborated to establish a standardized workflow combining preanalytical and sequencing solutions to analyze precious clinical liquid and solid biospecimens. Discovery Life Sciences has sequenced tens of thousands of samples from oncology patients using its harmonized Whole Exome and RNA-Seq platforms. This effort significantly contributed to building M2GEN's ORIEN AVATAR® database which has recently been launched to the global pharma, biopharma and molecular and companion diagnostic industry to enhance oncology research, improve protocol design for and support patient identification and enrollment to clinical trials, thus, accelerating the discovery and development of new diagnostics, medicines and targeted therapies for cancer patients.

"M2GEN's best in class bioinformatics services, combined with the ability to annotate data against M2GEN's longitudinal clinical and molecular databases, perfectly complement the suite of genomic sequencing services offered by HudsonAlpha Discovery ," said Shawn Levy, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at HudsonAlpha Discovery.

"We are excited to expand our long-standing successful collaboration with Discovery Life Sciences by providing our oncology focused bioinformatics services and solutions to Discovery," said Oliver Hampton PhD, Vice President of Bioinformatics & Biostatistics at M2GEN. "This agreement demonstrates the power of our multi-disciplinary expertise to access, curate, harmonize and interpret complex clinical and molecular data sets and to leverage our high-depth database for the benefit of interpreting and adding value to information generated by third parties", adds Helge Bastian, PhD, M2GEN's President & CEO.

About M2GEN
M2GEN®is an oncology-focused health informatics solutions company with the mission to help patients get access to the best treatments by leveraging clinical and molecular data to accelerate the discovery, development and delivery of tailored and more personalized therapies. M2GEN's approach is to transform cancer care through application of genome analysis of patient-derived tumor specimens and translating novel molecular insights combined with clinical insights for the actualization of precision oncology therapeutics and diagnostics.

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