NEW YORK – Known Medicine and Duke University on Thursday began a partnership to evaluate the Known Medicine ODIN platform's ability to predict drug efficacy for lung cancer patients.
The collaboration seeks to validate the platform's capability in a study of 75 patients with lung cancer. Kamran Mahmood, associate professor of medicine at Duke, will lead the initiative.
Known Medicine's platform uses patient tumor samples to generate 3D organoid models of tumors, which the company calls M3DUSA Models. Those models are then treated with different drugs or drug combinations to observe which treatment has the best response using high-content images. The platform also uses omics-level datasets and machine learning to analyze the images of the models and explore how these cells are responding to different treatments and the biological mechanisms underlying their behavior.
The platform can be used to both select the best treatment for patients and to advance drug development by identifying the best patient population to study.
Salt Lake City-based startup Known Medicine was launched out of Y Combinator startup incubator in 2020. Last year, the firm raised $7.2 million in seed funding to advance its platform.