NEW YORK – Bioinformatics firm Genialis announced on Monday a collaboration with Cancer Research Horizons (CHR), the innovation arm of Cancer Research UK, aimed at validating the company's core ResponderID therapy response prediction platform.
CHR will support Genialis by curating anonymized colorectal cancer datasets containing omics and clinical metadata from diverse patient populations. Genialis will use these datasets to improve and validate its machine learning-driven platform's ability to identify biomarkers predictive of patient response to KRAS inhibitors, immunotherapies, and other targeted therapies.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Genialis, which has offices in Boston and Ljubljana, Slovenia, recently raised $13 million in a Series A financing round and has also partnered with OncXerna Therapeutics to model RNA-seq based gene expression signatures of gastric cancer.
"Cancer Research UK's research network is generating huge amounts of detailed, highly curated data that can be used to support the development of tools and products that can benefit patients," Joe Day, senior business development executive at CRH, said in a statement. "At CRH, we are looking to support our research community to maximize the impact of this data through establishing secure and transparent data partnerships, and we are thrilled to enable this collaboration with Genialis."
"Access to the data from various UK-based cohorts will provide additional diversity to Genialis' model validation work," said Genialis CEO Rafael Rosengarten, "thus ensuring the broadest clinical utility of our biomarkers."