NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Sage Bionetworks today announced a deal with AstraZeneca aimed at the personalized treatment of cancer patients.
The deal, Sage said, may also lead to the development of new cancer therapeutics.
Sage will combine its expertise in computer models of disease genetics with AstraZeneca's expertise in oncology as well as access to the drug manufacturer's compounds to investigate regulatory pathways common in different cancers. The work will use large coherent cancer genomic datasets and predictive disease models developed by Sage.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The collaboration, Sage said, could potentially provide data-driven rationales for prioritizing therapeutic targets for new drug development and help identify patients who may benefit the most from such new drugs.
"We are looking forward to collaborating with Sage Bionetworks to build realistic, predictive models of cancers to expand our current understanding of these diseases and potentially harness that knowledge into new target identification, portfolio positioning, and patient selection, all of which we hope will lead to new treatment options for patients," Susan Galbraith, vice president and head of the Oncology Innovative Medicines unit at AstraZeneca, said in a statement.
Based in Seattle, Sage is a non-profit medical research organization that uses molecular and clinical datasets for improved therapeutic development.