Veracyte, Inc. announced that it has entered into a long-term strategic collaboration with Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC and the Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson & Johnson to advance the development and commercialization of novel diagnostic tests to detect lung cancer at its earliest stages, when the disease is most treatable. The collaboration will build upon foundational field of injury science where genomic changes associated with lung cancer can be identified with a simple brushing of a person's airway to develop new interventions that can save lives. Under terms of the agreement, Veracyte and the Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson & Johnson, whose mission is to prevent, intercept and cure lung cancer, will combine clinical study cohorts involving more than 5,000 patients with multiple years of clinical outcome data. Veracyte will contribute bronchial and nasal samples from its clinical trials, which are part of the company's extensive lung cancer-focused biorepository. Veracyte will deploy its RNA whole-transcriptome sequencing platform, utilizing high-dimensional data and machine learning pipelines on the combined cohort, providing the most comprehensive genomic content available which the Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson & Johnson will have access to for therapeutic purposes. The collaboration is expected to accelerate two key lung cancer programs for Veracyte. First, the development of the first non-invasive nasal swab test for early lung cancer detection and, secondly, the commercialization of its Percepta classifier on the company’s RNA whole-transcriptome sequencing platform, which, as a result of this collaboration, is expected to launch in the first half of 2019.