NEW YORK – Avacta Therapeutics said Monday that it has inked a deal with Tempus AI to advance its precision oncology pipeline.
Under the terms of the deal, London-based Avacta will tap into Tempus' datasets, which include tumor samples and clinical data from more than 200,000 patients across many tumor types. Avacta will use these data to characterize the biology of patients' tumor microenvironments as well as the activity of the fibroblast activation protein (FAP). Avacta is advancing a platform dubbed PreCision, which targets the FAP that's expressed by solid tumors.
Drugs developed with the PreCision platform involve cytotoxic elements that Avacta calls warheads. These warheads are bound to an engineered peptide, which only FAP can cleave.
Avacta plans to use data gleaned from Tempus' real-world data and clinical datasets to identify patients who would benefit from the peptide drug conjugates developed with its PreCision platform. Tempus will also provide analytical support and computational biology expertise.
"The Tempus AI real-world database and industry-leading AI capabilities will enable us to better assess the specific patient population most likely to respond to our PreCision therapies, enabling faster, smarter clinical development with the highest probability of success," Avacta CEO Christina Coughlin said in a statement.
Avacta also said Monday that it has added two preclinical programs to its pipeline, AVA6103 and AVA7100. The former involves an exatecan payload, and the latter is designed to treat cancers with various FAP expression levels, including low FAP expression.