NEW YORK – Ocean Genomics said on Wednesday that it has partnered with Seoul, South Korea-based Geninus to develop RNA-based biomarkers and advance research and clinical applications with hospital, academic, and biotechnology clients.
As part of the agreement, the firms will launch Pittsburgh-based Ocean's artificial intelligence-based txome.ai analysis and biomarker platform as a cloud-based and on-premises tool in Korea.
The txome.ai platform, which is currently offered as part an early-access program by Ocean, extracts a set of transcriptomic features from RNA-seq data and combines them with optional sample labels to provide candidate classifiers across a variety of applications.
Geninus will use the txome.ai platform to widen its CancerScan clinical diagnostics platform for its hospital customers and for biomarker discovery services with academic and biotechnology clients. CancerScan incorporates an information management system, a bioinformatics pipeline, variant annotation, clinical reports, and data center to inform personalized cancer treatment with targeted therapeutics and immunotherapy in hospitals in Japan and Korea.
"Ocean Genomics' expertise in AI and computational method development, together with Geninus' translational experts and access to data is a powerful combination," Carl Kingsford, cofounder and CEO of Ocean, said in a statement. "We can advance the field and enhance the uses of RNA biomarkers in clinical and research applications … and provide essential insights for clinicians who care for cancer patients."
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
"Genome analysis for precision cancer medicine is becoming an essential process in hospitals [and] gene expression analysis on tumor tissue RNA can deliver critical information for targeted therapy and immunotherapy," Woong Yang Park, CEO of Geninus, said in a statement.