Bioinformatics partnership to tailor cancer treatments

The US Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI) has announced a strategic collaboration with Indivumed, a German oncology research company, designed to harness the power of molecular and clinical cancer data for tailoring successful treatments for individual cancer patients.

Indivumed’s global Cancer Database and Biobank contains more than 4.5 million biological data points associated with greater than 600,000 discrete tumour, blood and urine samples obtained from more than 25,000 cancer patients. The company follows highly standardised processes for the collection and preservation of biospecimen samples from cancer patients, which results in high-quality molecular and clinical datasets.

“Accessing Indivumed’s global Cancer Database is a great opportunity for us to better understand how all the pieces of a cancer patient’s biology fit together by detecting complex dependencies in this extensive data set,” said PNRI’s Dr David Galas, an expert in computational biology and leader of the collaboration. “Understanding the biology of cancer from the patient data will provide invaluable insight into various cancers and how to treat it in the most precise manner.”

The Galas Lab will apply its proprietary computational method for deciphering the biological complexity of human development and disease. This method has been successfully used to analyse a wide variety of data — from RNA profiles in patients with autoimmune disease to childhood development — though this will be its first application in cancer.

“Allowing David’s extremely innovative analytical platform to survey our Cancer Database will enable Indivumed and collaborative research partners to better understand the complexity of cancer and to translate their specific targets and biomarkers in the context of the clinical world of cancer,” said Indivumed CEO Dr Hartmut Juhl. “Overall, we hope to get closer to the development of a true precision medicine for cancer patients.”