Wednesday, April 25, 2018
AI genomics company Freenome today announces its partnership with leading proteomics company Biognosys to enhance its broad-signal approach to early-cancer detection and precision oncology. By decoding cell-free (cf) biomarker patterns of once unthinkable complexity, Freenome’s artificial intelligence (AI) genomics platform is poised to detect cancer at its earliest stages and help clinicians optimize the next generation of precision therapies.
At the molecular level, the existence of circulating fragments of tumor DNA (ctDNA) in the blood is well established; however due to statistical, biologic, and economic limitations, ctDNA has been shown to be an unreliable stand-alone biomarker for early-cancer screening.
Freenome’s AI genomics platform looks beyond tumor DNA to analyze the body’s own response to cancer – the fragments of cfDNA and cfRNA that are released into the bloodstream when the presence of cancer leads to the destruction of immune and other cells in the tumor environment. Partnering with Biognosys enhances Freenome’s multi-analyte, broad-signal approach by adding protein quantification of exceptional depth and precision in the development of its first commercially available screening test.
“We are pleased to work with Freenome, which is committed to going beyond the traditional single-analyte approach to genomic diagnostics,” said Oliver Rinner, PhD, CEO of Biognosys. “Its AI genomics platform is a natural fit for our next-generation proteomics technology, which supplies unbiased quantitative information about hundreds of proteins and thousands of peptides from a single sample analysis.”
According to Imran Haque, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Freenome, “Changes in protein expression can be either direct or surrogate markers for emerging disease processes in the body. Working with Biognosys gives us a distinct and complementary type of information to use alongside our genomic sequencing data, which in turn may improve the performance of our tests.”
In addition to its promise in early cancer screening, Freenome’s AI genomics platform has attracted academic institutions and Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies interested in solving other pressing challenges in cancer and other diseases, from predicting drug response to revealing novel targets for the next-generation of immuno-oncology and targeted therapies.
