Predictive Oncology Inc. (NASDAQ: POAI) and Cvergenx, Inc. today announced an agreement to form a strategic partnership that has the potential to revolutionize the field of radiation oncology with the first-ever genomics-based artificial intelligence approach to personalized radiotherapy and drug discovery.
The objective of this collaboration will be to leverage and maximize the combined power of their respective proprietary technologies and domain expertise for a common purpose. By applying Predictive Oncology’s drug discovery, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities (PEDAL), and the Cvergenx precision genomics radiation therapy platform (pGRT™), the two companies will pursue ways in which to optimize radiotherapy (RT) to improve patient outcomes in a way that has never been done before.
“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,” said Raymond F. Vennare, Chief Executive Officer of Predictive Oncology. “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.”
By applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to explore the possibility of personalizing and optimizing radiotherapy prescription dose, combined with the discovery of medicinal radiosensitizers and radioprotectors, this strategic partnership may potentially lead to the repurposing of existing compounds or the development of an entirely new class of drugs. More than one million patients are treated with radiotherapy every year in the US. If the overall survival of RT-treated patients is improved by 4%, that would translate into 40,000 lives, almost equivalent 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,” explained 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 Professor of Oncologic Sciences at University of South Florida College of Medicine and Senior Member in the Department of Radiation Oncology and Biomedical Informatics at Moffitt Cancer Center, where pGRT is currently being evaluated in a Phase 2 prospective clinical trial for triple negative breast cancer (NCT05528133). Cvergenx is a spin-out of the Moffitt Cancer Center.
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