NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Bioinformatics firm Insilico Medicine and Champions Oncology have announced they will expand an existing collaboration and work together to validate preliminary findings showing that molecular signatures of patients' tumor grafts in mice resemble the signatures in human patients before and after treatment.
As part of this research, Insilico has been using Champion's TumorGrafts – a technology that enables researchers to engraft a piece of a patient's tumor onto immune-deficient mice and assess whether a particular treatment strategy is likely to be effective against the patient's disease. The procedure has shown to be a viable strategy for predicting response with single-agent and combination chemotherapy regimes, as well as targeted biologics.
In this latest collaboration, Insilico will analyze gene expression data from Champions' tumor grafts before and after treatment, and compare them to signal pathway activation state changes in human cancer patients.
"This research collaboration may pave the way for a comprehensive drug discovery and development pipeline, where drugs and drug candidates may be selected and prioritized using in silico approaches and tested in human tissues engrafted into Champions Oncology mice or other animal models," Qingsong Zhu, Insilico's chief operating officer, said in a statement.