NEW YORK – France's Okomera said Monday that it has received a €1.5 million ($1.6 million) grant from Bpifrance to develop a new CRISPR screening assay for drug discovery in oncology.
Okomera will develop the assay in collaboration with Cancer Research Center of Marseille (CRCM). The firm said in a statement that it also received assistance from AstraZeneca in its grant application.
A spinout from the Pasteur Institute and École Polytechnique, Okomera raised €10.2 million in seed funding in December 2023. It is developing a desktop instrument for automated organoid screening.
"This partnership is an extraordinary opportunity to advance our understanding of cancer biology," Thomas Miller, a researcher at CRCM, said in a statement. "By developing and standardizing a CRISPR screening assay that can be directly applied to patient-derived organoids, we can create more accurate disease models. This will not only improve our ability to study cancer mechanisms but also enhance our capability to identify new therapeutic targets and develop more effective treatments."