NEW YORK – OncoPrecision said on Monday that it has begun validating its ex vivo functional precision medicine technology as a tool for guiding cancer treatment decisions for acute myeloid and acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients.
The New York-based company is funding these validation studies using the $3.3 million it raised in seed funding back in April. SOSV's IndieBio, GRIDX, New York Ventures, Creative Ventures, and Fundacion Para el Progreso de la Medicina participated in that round, among other investors. The firm has raised $4.2 million in total to date.
OncoPrecision's technology involves what OncoPrecision has dubbed Patient Micro Avatars. The avatars, derived from patients' tumor cells and combined with OncoPrecision's proprietary engineered cells, are meant to mimic both the tumor and the tumor microenvironment and trick cancer cells into acting as though they were still in the patient's body.
The company then exposes these micro avatars to different drugs and treatment combinations and uses flow cytometry and machine learning to observe which drugs elicit the best response.
Ultimately, OncoPrecision hopes clinicians will use the Patient Micro Avatars as part of a Drug Activity and Resistance Test, or DART, to help select the best treatments for their patients. The firm also aims to partner with pharmaceutical companies on their drug development programs.
"At OncoPrecision, we have the humbling view that while we are not capable yet to understand the complex mechanisms behind cancer therapy outcomes, cancer cells hold the answer, by integrating not only genetics and epigenetics, but also the plethora of layers that ultimately drive response or non-response to treatment," OncoPrecision Cofounder and CSO Gastón Soria said in a statement.