NEW YORK – Exscientia on Tuesday said it began the EXCYTE-1 prospective, observational study in which it is using its precision medicine platform to assess ex vivo drug activity in tumor-derived samples from ovarian cancer patients and the likelihood of treatment response.
The Oxford, UK-headquartered company is conducting the study with Arbeitsgemeinschaft Gynäkologische Onkologie (AGO) Study Group, a nonprofit gynecologic oncology network in Germany. The study will be carried out at multiple medical research centers throughout Europe.
In the study, investigators will analyze the ex vivo drug response to standard-of-care therapies in patients' tissue samples using Exscientia's precision medicine platform and compare those results to patients' progression-free survival on those treatments. Researchers will also compare ex vivo drug responses for patients with early relapses and progression-free survival greater than 12 months.
Exscientia's platform combines high-content imaging and deep learning image analysis. The company has previously applied its platform in the EXALT-1 prospective trial to select treatments for patients with hematologic malignancies. In that study, 54 percent of 56 patients experienced clinical benefit defined as more than 1.3-fold enhanced progression-free survival when treated with drugs prioritized by the platform, compared with the benefit they had on the last therapy they were on. In May, the company partnered with Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin to validate the ability of its platform to predict response and select treatments for blood cancer patients, building on the EXALT-1 results.
"A robust correlation between our platform's results and clinical outcomes will support the greater use of human tumor samples in the preclinical development of new drug candidates and translational cancer research," Nikolaus Krall, Exscientia's executive VP of precision medicine, said in a statement. "This study may further pave the way for the use of functional drug testing to guide treatment selection to achieve better patient outcomes."