NEW YORK – BostonGene today announced a partnership with the National Institutes of Health to offer molecular profiling and therapy recommendations in a cancer study.
The software firm is launching a new study with collaborators at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to analyze the clonal evolution of solid and liquid tumors in patients.
The NIH researchers will repeatedly biopsy patients over the course of several years and perform genomic and transcriptomic analysis of those samples. Using next-generation sequencing data submitted by the researchers, BostonGene will create a molecular portrait of the tumor and its environment to identify significant somatic alterations, evaluate protein expression, estimate tumor heterogeneity, and predict a number of molecular features, including neoantigens, hereditary disposition, and tumor clonality. BostonGene will also provide treatment options and recommendations.
BostonGene declined to disclose financial terms of the collaboration.
"We get collaborators who are helping our solution to become more intelligent," said BostonGene President and CEO Andrew Feinberg. "A number of components of our solution are based on AI, therefore, the more unique cases we review, the smarter we get."
BostonGene, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, offers analytics that aggregate and incorporate the latest cancer research to enable individualized therapy recommendations. The firm recently raised $50 million in Series A financing from Japanese software firm NEC.
Feinberg added that the study will look at how clonal evolution affects the treatments recommended for a patient.