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Pharma Tech Outlook | Wednesday, March 08, 2023
Predictive Oncology and Cvergenx partner to develop the first genomics-based precision radiation therapy and drug development strategy leveraging AI.
FREMONT, CA: “The central principle in precision medicine is that cancer therapy should be tailored to the individual tumor biology. Even so, radiation therapy, the most commonly utilized therapeutic agent in clinical oncology, has yet to enter the era of precision therapy,” says Raymond F. Vennare, Chief Executive Officer of Predictive Oncology. Predictive Oncology and Cvergenx, have formed a strategic partnership that has the potential to revolutionize the field of radiation oncology with the first artificial intelligence-based approach to personalized radiotherapy and drug discovery based on genomics.
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“We believe that the next and most significant paradigm shift in the field of radiation oncology will come from exploiting tumor genomics to optimize RT prescription dose and to identify drug targets for the development of radiosensitizers and radioprotectors for biopharma and industry,” adds Vennare.
This collaboration will utilize and optimize the combined potential of their proprietary technologies and domain expertise for a common goal. Predictive Oncology's drug discovery, AI and ML capabilities (PEDAL) and Cvergenx's precision genomics radiation therapy platform (pGRT) will be combined to optimize radiotherapy (RT) in a way never seen before in order to improve patient outcomes.
In this way, existing compounds may be repurposed, or a new class of drugs may be developed. More than one million people receive radiation treatment annually in the United States. If the overall survival of RT-treated patients increases by 4 percent, 40,000 lives will be saved, which is nearly similar to eradicating breast cancer.
“Today, RT is prescribed based on a one-size fits all approach where all tumors are treated with uniform doses of RT. pGRT provides the first clinically validated approach to optimize RT prescription dose for each individual patient," explains Javier F. Torres-Roca, MD, Co-founder and Acting Chief Executive Officer of Cvergenx. "The pGRT platform has been shown to correctly identify radiosensitizers and radioprotectors from large pharmacogenomic screens. We believe this knowledge can improve the clinical outcome of patients treated with radiotherapy.”
Dr. Torres-Roca is also a Professor of Oncologic Sciences at the University of South Florida College of Medicine and a Senior Member in the Department of Radiation Oncology and Biomedical Informatics at the Moffitt Cancer Center, where pGRT is being investigated in a Phase 2 prospective clinical trial for triple-negative breast cancer (NCT05528133). Cvergenx emerged from the Moffitt Cancer Center.
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