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Owkin Expands Into Western Europe With Nine Precision Medicine Partnerships

NEW YORK – Owkin said Wednesday that it has expanded its artificial intelligence-enabled precision medicine platform to nine centers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. 

The research and drug-discovery partnerships will focus on prostate cancer, muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC), and cardiovascular disease. For its part, Owkin will bring its BiomarkerPlus outcome prediction platform; its TargetMatch target discovery platform; and its TrialPlus clinical trial optimization platform. 

The nine centers include Charité-University Medicine Berlin, Lausanne University Hospital, University Hospital of Basel, Technical University of Munich, University Hospital Erlangen, University Hospital Leipzig, University Hospital of Bern, University Hospital Mannheim-Heidelberg, and the Medical University of Vienna. Together, the centers represent 24 percent of all outpatient cases and 15 percent of all total patients in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. 

The BiomarkerPlus platform involves Owkin using multimodal patient data to identify early-stage prostate cancer patients who are most likely to experience disease progression following curative treatment, making them potentially eligible for different therapeutic options. Owkin will also work with one of the centers, University Hospital Erlangen, to analyze MIBC patient slides for FGFR3 mutations.

Projects involving Owkin's TargetMatch platform, meanwhile, will involve analyzing multimodal patient data, including digitized histology and RNA sequencing, to inform treatment response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and to identify new targets and treatment strategies for MIBC patients. 

For the TrialPlus clinical trial optimization, Owkin will use machine learning to help University Hospital Leipzig to better design cardiovascular disease clinical trials. 

Beyond BiomarkerPlus, TargetMatch, and TrialPlus, Owkin plans to work with University Hospital Erlangen to validate the second version of its MSIntuit CRC artificial intelligence diagnostic tool to screen colorectal cancer patients for microsatellite instability. According to Owkin, the firm aims to validate the tool on more diverse patient populations. 

Owkin is also expanding its MOSAIC network to three of the newly partnered centers, University Hospital Erlangen, Charité-University Medicine Berlin, and Lausanne University Hospital. Through the MOSAIC network, Owkin is building what it says will be the world's largest spatial omics dataset in oncology. The network includes 7,000 patient samples representing seven cancer indications. 

"Partnering with top academic institutions is an inevitable asset for our expansion strategy," Guillaume Bézie, the director of Western Europe partnerships at Owkin, said in a statement. "By capturing the diverse landscape of human health, we empower our AI to better address the unique needs of all individuals. With our partners, we are fully committed to accelerate the secondary use of multimodal patient data for the purpose of giving the right treatment for each patient."