My Personal Therapeutics, a London based biotechnology company announced today that it has completed technology licensing and secured initial funding to transform cancer care. Investment was led by London based Startup Funding Club and independent international investors.
Advances in genomics have led to a push towards “Precision Medicine” in which a single driver mutation in a tumor is identified and then is targeted with a specific drug treatment. The challenge is that most cancer patients have multiple mutations and single drugs aren’t effective.
Attempts to drug specific parts of the tumor network generally fail because complex networks rapidly adapt; this is a key reason that patients relapse. As a result, for many cancers the response rates are barely in the double digits.
Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Center for Personalized Cancer Therapeutics (CPCT) in New York (USA) take a revolutionary new approach to cancer therapeutics.
My Personal Therapeutics has exclusively licensed the Personal Discovery Process (PDP) technology from Mount Sinai for global commercialization. PDP leverages Big Data to build personalized ‘fruit fly avatars’ that model individual patients at an unprecedented level of complexity (see Figure). Using robotics, thousands of drugs are screened in combinations to identify drug cocktails designed to target the tumor while preserving the patient’s quality of life.
A strength of this approach is in our ability to account for each patient tumor’s genetic complexity at a level never before achieved in a clinical setting. All recommended treatment combinations will include a cancer drug and 1 or more non cancer drugs, making treatments less toxic and more affordable.
American biotech entrepreneur, Laura Towart founded My Personal Therapeutics to give cancer patients a better option. Laura is also a founder and former CEO of Celmatix, a leader in personalised women’s health. “I’ve been working with Dr. Ross Cagan for 5 years for the opportunity to bring the Personal Discovery Process (PDP) to patients worldwide. I truly believe in patient-centric medicine and am proud that we are now able to offer patients personalised drug screening at an unprecedented scale. In patients that have already developed resistance to the standard of care we can provide a potential lifeline.”
We are working with leading medical centers to make PDP available to patients.
Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Nahuel Villegas shares,” As a cancer biologist, it is very exciting to have the chance to put together a hundred years of basic cancer research with up-to-date biotechnological advances; this is the perfect blend to push forward the development of effective personalised cancer therapies."
All of the genomic information and drug treatment data we are collecting will help us to develop TuMatch, an AI powered service, which will enable rapid and affordable personalised treatment recommendations. We hope to have TuMatch available by the end of the year for colorectal cancer, with other cancers in 2020. For further information, please visit https://www.mypersonaltherapeutics.com/
About My Personal Therapeutics
My Personal Therapeutics LTD is a UK registered company founded in August 2018 and based in Open Cell London.
