NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) — The Encheng Group said today that it has signed an agreement to acquire the exclusive commercial rights to DarwinHealth's precision cancer medicine tests in the Greater China region, which includes Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.
The multi-year agreement specifically covers DarwinOncoTarget — which identifies aberrantly active and pharmacologically actionable proteins in patient-specific tumor samples — and DarwinOncoTreat — which prioritizes approved and investigational tumor checkpoint-targeting drugs for individual patients.
Both DarwinOncoTarget and DarwinOncoTreat are based on proprietary algorithms licensed from Columbia University, which exclusively offers the New York Department of Health-certified tests in the US through its pathology department.
Under the terms of the deal, New York City-based DarwinHealth stands to receive undisclosed milestone payments and royalties. Additional terms were not disclosed.
"DarwinOncoTarget and DarwinOncoTreat algorithms represent highly innovative technologies for interpreting tumor-derived RNA expression profiles," Encheng Group Chairman Bin Wang said in a statement. "Therapeutic approaches to precision-based cancer treatment based on this innovative technology will be evaluated in the context of patient-specific PDX models and tumor-like cultures at Encheng's Center for Precision Medicine in Shanghai, and we expect that the treatment protocols predicted by DarwinHealth's algorithms will improve upon the current status of medical treatment for cancer."