Medical Device Network

Guardant Health expands into North Africa and the Middle East

The company has made moves to expand its market by partnering with Hikma Pharmaceuticals to expand across the region.

The California-based precision oncology company Guardant Health has struck a deal to promote its range of liquid and tissue biopsy tests for cancer screening across the Middle East and North African markets.

Partnering with the multinational pharmaceutical company Hikma Pharmaceuticals, the partnership plans to market Guardant Health’s recurrence monitoring and tumour mutation profiling across all solid cancers in countries throughout the region.

The partnership includes Guardant Health’s products such as Shield test for cancer screening and detection, Guardant Reveal for disease detection,Guardant360 and its variant TissueNext, which is intended for genomic profiling across all solid cancers.

Simranjit Singh, Guardant Health Europe, the Middle East and Africa (AMEA) CEO, said: “Today, an increasing number of patients with cancer are being detected at the advanced stage, making it more crucial to match these patients to appropriate therapies in a timely manner. Ultimately, our goal is to make cancer screening easy and effective so that we can detect cancer earlier when it’s most treatable.”

It comes amid a series of international expansions for Guardant Health, with the company introducing its blood-based colorectal cancer (CRC) screening test Shield in South Korea in November 2023.

In May last year, the company also expanded into Singapore, receiving approval from the country’s Health and Sciences Authority to market its Guardant360 CDx liquid biopsy test for patients with advanced solid tumours.

Hikma’s executive vice chairman Mazen Darwazah said: “Our partnership with Guardant Health adds next-generation sequencing diagnostics that can potentially transform cancer care in the Middle East and North Africa bringing hope to patients facing this challenging journey. We are excited to partner with Guardant Health, as their offering can help patients at all stages of the disease.”

In May of 2021, Guardant Health reported that its first blood-only liquid biopsy for detecting minimal residual disease (MRD) was able to identify stage I-IV colorectal cancer (CRC) patients with increased risk of recurrence, with greater sensitivity than previous iterations.