Biotech leader, Known Medicine partners with Duke University to predict drug treatment responses
Salt Lake City — Known Medicine, a rising biotechnology powerhouse aimed to discover new cancer drugs, announced a partnership with Duke University to predict drug efficacy for lung cancer patients. This collaboration will enable Known Medicine to optimize and validate their novel ODINTM platform. Duke University collaborator, Kamran Mahmood, MD, MPH, is the lead collaborator on this initiative. Together, Known Medicine and Duke University aim to determine if Known Medicine’s novel platform can be used to predict actual clinical outcomes in 75 patients.
“We are incredibly grateful for the opportunity to partner with Dr. Kamran Mahmood and the greater Duke University community. As one of the leading cancer institutes in the country, this partnership allows us to generate clinical, biological, and computational insights to improve cancer patient lives,” says Andrea Mazzocchi, PhD, CEO and co-founder at Known Medicine.
“This collaboration with start-up Known Medicine will enable clinicians to provide personalized therapy to their patients. We are excited to be part of the Known Medicine community and look forward to future collaborations and projects to improve patient care and treatment for lung cancer,” says Mahmood, associate professor of Medicine at Duke.
Known Medicine generates thousands of 3-dimensional (3D) micro-tumors from a single patient tumor or malignant pleural effusion sample. Each micro-tumor is then treated with a different drug or combination of drugs. High-content images are obtained and analyzed to observe the response to treatment and identify the best treatment for each cancer.
Known Medicine is able to take the experiment out of the patient by testing hundreds of drugs in parallel on their micro-tumor platform while observing how the patient-specific cancer cells respond. Their machine learning-based analysis relies on high-content images of these 3D micro-tumors to better understand why cells respond to one treatment over another. Functional outcomes are combined with high dimensional -omics datasets to identify the best patients for existing drugs, and the best potential new drug candidates.
About Known Medicine
Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Known Medicine is building a predictive engine to capture patient-to-patient variability and develop the best drug for every cancer. Known Medicine merges biomaterials and cancer biology with machine learning to create a unique dataset comprising functional treatment outcomes and immunologic, genomic, and proteomic profiles for every patient. By understanding how and why a patient responds to which therapy, Known Medicine is able to develop effective drug treatments with a high likelihood of success, and discover new drugs as its engine strengthens. Learn more at www.knownmed.com, or connect on Twitter and LinkedIn.
