INDUSTRIAL IMPACT, MEDICAL
Globenewswire | April 05, 2023
Absci Corporation a generative AI drug creation company, and M2GEN, an oncology bioinformatics company with the most advanced lifetime-consented clinicogenomics data to accelerate discovery research, today announced a partnership to create new cancer medicines and bring them to market at unprecedented speed. Absci’s generative AI drug creation platform will tap into M2GEN’s clinical and molecular data set, ORIEN AVATAR® (AVATAR), to accelerate the creation of therapeutics for a range of malignancies and patient profiles, bringing AI drug creation to the fight against cancer.
A key challenge in creating effective cancer treatments is finding specific antigens that can be targeted by immunotherapies. M2GEN’s AVATAR database represents a valuable resource for discovering such antigens. Absci will use its reverse immunology technology to first search the database for antibodies from patients with exceptional immune responses, then computationally re-assemble antigen-antibody pairs as promising starting points for drug development.
This partnership brings together AI drug creation technology and oncology bioinformatics to potentially reduce the time and cost to create better cancer treatments. Absci’s Integrated Drug Creation™ platform unites generative AI and wet-lab capabilities to screen billions of cells per week, allowing it to go from AI-designed antibodies to lab-validated candidates in as little as six weeks. As the nexus between patients, researchers, and the pharmaceutical industry, M2GEN is uniquely positioned and equipped with the richest clinicogenomic data set, and a lifetime patient-consented Total Cancer Care® (TCC) protocol, to accelerate drug discovery and development and transform how cancer is treated. M2GEN’s real-world data set comes from its Oncology Research Information Exchange Network® (ORIEN) partners, an alliance of 18 cancer centers across more than a dozen U.S. states.
“M2GEN and its ORIEN partners are premier leaders in the field of oncology data research and bring a wealth of unique data sets to our generative AI platform that may enable us to ultimately shave years off the drug discovery process,” said Sean McClain, CEO of Absci. “This is an important leap forward to better understand individualized protein-protein interactions on cancer cells, moving us toward delivering on the promise of personalized medicine.”
The cornerstone of ORIEN is the lifetime-consented TCC protocol, one of the first longitudinal cancer patient databases of its kind, with over 360,000 patients enrolled nationwide. TCC enables patient monitoring throughout their treatment journey, with the goal to transform how cancer is treated. M2GEN and ORIEN research-facilitated projects are monitored by a multi-institution governing body, which includes scientists and research leaders from network members, to ensure adherence to privacy protocols and best practices.
“Absci’s recent breakthrough creating de novo antibodies changed the idea of what’s possible for drug discovery,” said Jim Gabriele, CEO of M2GEN. “This was just one of the things that excited us about partnering together. Their AI-led approach to targeting biologics to make the drug discovery process more efficient and dramatically impact patients’ lives made them an ideal partner,” said Gabriele. “Together, by utilizing our real-word data, we plan to advance personalized cancer treatments in pursuit of a cure.”
This partnership maintains Absci’s momentum building one of the largest repositories of patient data in the industry to train its generative AI platform for protein drug creation. The company recently partnered with St. John’s Cancer Institute to train on their datasets to discover medicines faster.
About Absci
Absci is a generative AI drug creation company that combines AI with scalable wet lab technologies to create better biologics for patients, faster. Our Integrated Drug Creation™ platform unlocks the potential to accelerate time to clinic and increase the probability of success by simultaneously optimizing multiple drug characteristics important to both development and therapeutic benefit. With the data to learn, the AI to create, and the wet lab to validate, Absci can screen billions of cells per week, allowing it to go from AI-designed antibodies to wet lab-validated candidates in as little as six weeks. Absci’s vision is to deliver breakthrough therapeutics at the click of a button, for everyone. Absci's headquarters is in Vancouver, WA, its AI Research Lab is in New York City, and its Innovation Center is in Zug, Switzerland.
Read More
CELL AND GENE THERAPY, INDUSTRIAL IMPACT
Bio-Techne Corporation | March 20, 2023
Bio-Techne Corporation announced it has completed its participation in the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult Process Analytical Technology (Catapult PAT) consortium, a multi-year collaboration involving 24 partner companies, technology providers, therapy developers, and charities. The Catapult PAT consortium is the first initiative of this scale and functional expertise with member companies and organizations collaborating to develop cell and gene therapy-specific process analytical technologies.
The PAT initiative began in January 2021 with a series of experiments designed to monitor process parameters of an exemplar 8-day T-cell expansion bioprocess using primary T-cells. Data were gathered from five independent analyses to generate an extensive, world-first dataset. An analysis of multiple cytokine targets was conducted using high-plex Luminex® immunoassays and the precision multiplexing Ella™ platform from Bio-Techne. The automated workflow of the Ella platform proved to be particularly amenable to the efficiency, accuracy, and throughput demands inherent in a bioprocess manufacturing environment. With its robust performance in this project, the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult plans to incorporate Ella™ into an existing CGT Catapult facility to further support scientists in the UK.
"As a leader in the forefront of innovative tools to measure cytokines, we are honored to be a part of the Catapult PAT initiative to help advance cell and gene therapy development," said Will Geist, President of Bio-Techne's Protein Sciences Segment. "Bio-Techne remains excited about the potential of these advanced therapies to improve patient outcomes and treat a wide range of diseases that currently have very poor or ineffective treatments."
Established by Innovate UK, the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult fosters collaborations between academia, industry, and healthcare providers to develop new technology and drive innovation. Catapult experts cover all aspects of advanced therapies, from research and development to clinical adoption and every step in between.
About Bio-Techne
Bio-Techne Corporation is a global life sciences company providing innovative tools and bioactive reagents for the research and clinical diagnostic communities. Bio-Techne products assist scientific investigations into biological processes and the nature and progress of specific diseases. They aid in drug discovery efforts and provide the means for accurate clinical tests and diagnoses. With thousands of products in its portfolio, Bio-Techne generated approximately $1.1 billion in net sales in fiscal 2022 and has approximately 3,000employees worldwide.
Read More
CELL AND GENE THERAPY
PR Newswire | May 12, 2023
Mission Bio, the single-cell DNA and multi-omics company, announced today the Tapestri® Genome Editing Solution, an end-to-end product for genome editing analysis. The product will be previewed next week at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Conference (ASGCT) 26th Annual Meeting. By enabling robust single-cell insights impacting both efficacy and safety, the solution will be a powerful analytical tool for developing the next generation of gene-edited therapies.
The first CRISPR-modified therapy is now under regulatory review, and many similar cell-based therapies are expected to follow for multiple intractable diseases. However, genome editing can result in complex, heterogeneous mixtures of edits that make it challenging to apply a level of process control over genome-edited cell products. The Tapestri® Genome Editing Solution addresses these challenges by measuring gene editing outcomes at single-cell resolution, capturing the co-occurrence of on- and off-target edits, as well as the zygosity of edits, which conventional bulk analyses cannot. Additionally, this analysis can be completed within days by processing thousands of cells at a time without any prior selection, while conventional analytical methods require months for clonal outgrowth.
An early iteration of the Tapestri® Genome Editing Solution is currently being tested by key genome editing researchers and leading cell therapy developers in academia and industry, who are providing vital feedback on the analysis. Mission Bio recently collaborated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the Genome Editing Consortium, which provided qualified samples to collaborators to assess technologies that report variant size and frequency within a mixed cell population. Samantha Maragh, NIST Genome Editing Program Leader, will present results of the study at 12:00 p.m. PT on May 17 (Poster 533) at the ASGCT Annual Meeting.
"We look forward to pulling back the curtain on our end-to-end Genome Editing Solution at ASGCT," said Todd Druley, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer at Mission Bio. "The data acquired under the Genome Editing Consortium further demonstrates the Tapestri® Platform's potential as a standard analysis tool within the genome editing community. Given the heterogeneous results of gene editing strategies, there is a great need to address both industry and regulatory genome editing concerns with a consistent and highly precise technology for accurately measuring gene editing outcomes, and our new offering will be a complete solution to do just that."
About Mission Bio
Mission Bio is a life sciences company that accelerates discoveries and cures for a wide range of diseases by equipping researchers with the tools they need to better measure and predict our resistance and response to new therapies. Mission Bio's multi-omics approach improves time-to-market for new therapeutics, including innovative cell and gene therapies that provide new pathways to health. Founded in 2014, Mission Bio has secured investment from Novo Growth, Cota Capital, Agilent Technologies, Mayfield Fund, and others.
The company's Tapestri® Platform gives researchers around the globe the power to interrogate every molecule in a cell together, providing a comprehensive understanding of activity from a single sample. Tapestri® is the only commercialized multi-omics platform capable of analyzing DNA and protein simultaneously from the same sample at single-cell resolution. The Tapestri® Platform is being utilized by customers at leading research centers, pharmaceutical, and diagnostics companies worldwide to develop treatments and eventually cures for cancer.
Read More