A new five-year project to develop and evaluate new biomarkers for colon cancer has been launched by OncoTrack and managed by Bayer and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. The project will aim at developing personalized medicine for the treatment and management of cancer.

OncoTrack is a new international consortium of academic researchers, pharmaceutical firms, and commercial partners. OncoTrack is a great example of public-private partnerships. The participants of the project include AstraZeneca, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, Boehringer Ingelheim, Janssen Pharmaceutical, Merck, Pfizer, and Roche Diagnostics.

The project involves more than 60 scientists who will look forward to generate high-quality genomic and epigenetic data from colon cancer tumors and their metastases. The data would be compared with the germline genome of the patients. The data will also have a detailed molecular characterization of the tumors. The OncoTrack will also build a new series of xenograft tumor models and cell lines derived from the same set of tumors to support the tumor biology research.

The detailed data would help the OncoTrack to solve many queries related to the relationship between genotype and phenotype.