POAI Subsidiary Helomics Continues Progress Towards Goal of Developing an AI-Driven Predictive Model of Ovarian Cancer
GlobeNewswire GlobeNewswire•March 31, 2020
MINNEAPOLIS, March 31, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Predictive Oncology Inc. (NASDAQ: POAI) (“POAI” or “the Company”), a knowledge-driven company focused on applying artificial intelligence (“AI”) to personalized medicine and drug discovery, today announced continued progress towards by its Helomics subsidiary towards the goal of developing an AI-driven predictive model of ovarian cancer (CancerQuest 2020).
CancerQuest2020 (CCQ2020) is focused on building an AI-driven model of ovarian cancer that will predict drug response and outcome. Predictive models embody the knowledge from these profiles to create a “computational expert” or a “virtual patient” that can be queried. Predictive models such as these are of high value to Pharmaceutical companies as they can be used to quickly select patients for clinical trials and assess potential new drugs or biomarkers computationally (so called “in silico”) before initiating expensive laboratory experiments. Simply put, our predictive models will save time and money in the search for new targeted therapies.
Using the power of AI, the model draws on data generated from over 150,000 tumor cases obtained from 15+ years of clinical testing on living patient tumors, bringing together multi-omic data, i.e. drug response, genomic (mutations), transcriptomic (gene expression) and tissue-omic (tumor pathology) profiles to predict drug response and outcome.
“Despite some headwinds imposed by the current COVID-19 pandemic, the Helomics team has been working diligently to meet both our clinical testing priorities for ovarian cancer patients and their oncologists, as well as maintaining progress on data generation for CCQ2020” commented Gerald Vardzel, President of Helomics. “Also, we received our formal letter of compliance today for our CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) recertification survey conducted on March 10, 2020. Results of this survey showed all requirements were met and that we were in full compliance with applicable regulations,” added Dr Arlette Uihlein, Helomics Medical Director and Vice President, Operations and Pathology Services
“In a true team effort across the company we have made solid progress on our CCQ2020 milestones this quarter; we ramped up our sequencing effort as part of our UPMC-Magee collaboration; initiated further digitization of our histopathology slide collection; renewed our collaboration with Genomics England 100,000 genomes project and completed development of our AI model build framework so we can train millions of potential models at scale using cloud resources,” indicated Dr. Mark Collins, Helomics CTO.
POAI is bringing precision medicine, or tailored medical treatment using the individual characteristics of each patient, to the treatment of cancer. Through the company’s Helomics division, the company leverages its unique, clinically validated patient derived (PDx) smart tumor profiling platform to provide oncologists with a road map to help individualize therapy. In addition, the company is leveraging artificial intelligence and its proprietary database of over 150,000 cancer tumors to build AI-driven models of tumor drug response to improve outcomes for the patients of today and tomorrow.
For more information about Predictive Oncology, please visit www.predictive-oncology.com.
