NEW YORK – Pangea Biomed on Thursday said it will use its artificial intelligence (AI) platform to explore personalized cancer treatment strategies with the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University.
Pangea and OHSU's goal within this collaboration is to identify therapies that can overcome resistance to cancer drugs and tailor treatments for patients. To do this, the partners will use Pangea's ENLIGHT-DP, a two-step AI system that pairs the DeepPT deep-learning framework, which predicts tumor mRNA expression from slides, and the ENLIGHT (Expression Networks for highLIGHting Tumor vulnerabilities) algorithm, which predicts patients' responses to targeted drugs and immunotherapies based on gene expression.
Specifically, Tel Aviv, Israel-headquartered Pangea will use ENLIGHT-DP to analyze RNA sequencing data and hematoxylin and eosin slides from biopsies taken longitudinally from OHSU patients enrolled in two clinical studies, the Molecular Mechanisms of Tumor Evolution and Resistance to Therapy (MMTERT) trial and Adaptive Multidrug Treatment of Evolving Cancers (AMTEC) trial. The studies are part of the Knight Cancer Institute's Serial Measurements of Molecular and Architectural Responses to Therapy program, in which researchers are investigating how to extend the benefits of cancer therapy and improve quality of life for patients with advanced cancer.
Over the five-month project, Pangea will also investigate transcriptomic changes, including coding and noncoding RNA transcripts, in patients through consecutive lines of treatment. Ultimately, Pangea and OHSU researchers hope to jointly publish a manuscript of their findings in this project.
"Teaming up with the Knight Cancer Institute enables us to delve deeper into understanding cancer treatment responses," Pangea CEO Tuvik Beker said in a statement. "We are excited about the potential breakthroughs that will emerge from this collaboration, leveraging our ENLIGHT platform to help us move beyond 'one-size-fits-all' therapeutics."