Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- General Electric Co. and Eli Lilly & Co. said they developed a way to identify 25 proteins in tumors that will help match cancer patients with treatments.

Many of the newest oncology medicines target proteins not shared by everyone, so they may not help some patients, Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE and Indianapolis-based Lilly said today in a statement.

Screening to find those proteins, or biomarkers, will save time and money and help patients avoid exposure to drugs that won’t work, the companies said. GE and Lilly plan to focus on breast, ovarian and lung cancers, and possibly on gastric malignancies as well. The mapping technology has been tested on colon and prostate cancer tissue samples, and the companies said it may work with all kinds of malignancies.

“This is one of the real holy grails in health care: embedding diagnostic capability inside a therapy company and vice versa so that you can develop more-effective drugs faster,” GE Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt said in an interview.

The companies are two years into a three-year partnership. Lilly and GE are discussing a three- to five-year extension of the agreement, Richard Gaynor, Lilly’s vice president of cancer research and clinical investigation, said in an interview.

Clinical Trials

The technology may help drug developers use fewer people in clinical trials, cutting time and expenses, the companies said. Lilly may implement it as early as the middle of next year, Gaynor said.

“The old days where you give one drug to just everyone in a population -- those days are gone,” Gaynor said.

The technology may also help identify the stem cells in a tumor, which may lead to new and more-targeted treatments.

“What it allows you to do is basically visualize the architecture of a cancer,” enabling scientists to see which cells are causing the tumor to grow, Gaynor said. “We’ve never been able to do that.”

Lilly makes cancer drugs including Erbitux, which doesn’t work in patients with a certain gene mutation. The company told U.S. regulators in December that instructions accompanying the medicine, which it markets with New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., should include data on the so-called KRAS gene mutation, which renders the medicine ineffective in colon cancer patients.

Advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said at the time that better screening tools were needed to find gene mutations.

GE began developing biotechnology-based tests after its purchase of Amersham Plc of the U.K. in April 2004. Immelt is expanding a line of products for predicting and preventing disease.

The announcement today was tied to GE’s Healthymagination, an initiative Immelt started in May to invest $6 billion by 2015 to help make health care more accessible, less expensive and more effective.

To contact the reporter on this story: Meg Tirrell in New York at mtirrell@bloomberg.net; Rachel Layne in Boston at rlayne@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 21, 2009 16:04 EDT