This September, Nanostring Technologies received a CE mark allowing it to begin selling a breast cancer clinical diagnostic in Europe. The Seattle-based maker of genomics tools for life sciences research first announced its intent to develop such a test to run on its proprietary technology platform two years ago. Now, in a series of studies reported in September in Nature, the US-based Cancer Genome Atlas Project uses the same subtyping scheme in its analyses of the genetic diversity of breast cancer (Nature 490, 61–70, 2012) as that used by Nanostring’s assay. Nanostring’s test, called PAM50, is just one of a growing number of genomics-based diagnostics for classifying patients according to their risk of developing disease and guiding therapy decisions in cancer and other indications (Table 1).
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