NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Nabsys will collaborate with Ariana Pharmaceuticals to identify structural variations related to breast and prostate cancer and how they affect clinical outcome of patients, the companies said today.
Nabsys is based out of Providence, RI, and has been developing semiconductor-based technology for detecting DNA. Last year, the company hired new management, including a new CEO, and said it planned to shift its focus to human whole-genome structural variation analysis in cancer. Previously, it had said an initial application of its technology would be for de novo assembly of microbial genomes.
Paris-based Ariana spun out of the Institut Pasteur in 2003 and also has a subsidiary in the US. It markets the KEM platform for clinical data analysis to identify and rank biomarker signatures and identify associations between biomarkers. The platform can handle a variety of data types, including genomic data and data from next-gen sequencing.
The companies will use Nabsys' semiconductor-based DNA mapping technology to identify the structural variants and Ariana's clinical data analysis tools to create a database for prostate adenocarcinoma and one for breast cancer to improve predictive capabilities that can be used in personalized treatment plans.
"The expertise of Ariana Pharma will allow Nabsys the ability to refine the right combination of structural variations for the right cancer sub-types and will ultimately help define the possible diagnostics and prognostics tools for these diseases," Nabsys CSO Tony Shuber said in a statement.
Mohammad Afshar, founder and CEO of Ariana Pharma, added that combining the firms' technologies would help identify "novel predictive signatures."