Myriad Genetics, Inc. and Personalis, Inc. announced that they have entered into an agreement to cross-license patent estates covering tumor-informed approaches to detect minimal residual disease (MRD). The agreement helps solidify each company?s freedom to operate in the MRD market and broadens patient access to the benefits of MRD testing. MRD tests are blood-based diagnostic tools that enable clinicians to monitor therapeutic responses to cancer treatment more closely than with traditional cancer detection technologies, such as imaging, and detect cancer recurrence earlier.

While the utilization of MRD testing is nascent, the adoption rate is growing quickly, and the market size is expected to mature to $20 billion over the next several years. Personalis and Myriad are each pioneering tumor-informed, genome-scale approaches to power ultra-sensitive MRD tests, enabling earlier cancer recurrence detection and more refined therapy monitoring than alternative approaches. Both companies value tumor-informed approaches for cancer patients and have developed deep, foundational patent estates in the field, and each sees the benefits of an ultra-sensitive approach as key to making MRD testing the standard of care.