AstraZeneca PLC Offers Preclinical Data in Crowdsourcing Effort to Develop New Cancer Therapies
September 22, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
LONDON – AstraZeneca will release preclinical data from more than 50 medicines in an effort to find new cancer treatments as part of a new challenge to tap the minds of researchers and clinicians across the globe.
AstraZeneca’s decision is part of a crowd-sourcing effort to accelerate the development for “synergistic tumor-fighting drug combinations,” Reuters reported this morning. The AstraZeneca –Sanger Drug Combination Prediction Challenge is aimed at targeting multiple paths for cancer treatments.
London-based AstraZeneca is joining forces with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the European Bioinformatic Institute, Sage Bionetworks, and the DREAM community on the AstraZeneca-Sanger Drug Combination Prediction DREAM Challenge in an effort to advance cancer research. According to genengnews.com, AstraZeneca’s data will include approximately “10,000 tested combinations that measure the ability of drugs to destroy cancer cell lines from different tumor types including colon, lung and breast cancer.” AstraZeneca’s drug combination data measures cell viability over 118 drugs and 85 cancer cell lines and monotherapy drug response data for each drug and cell line, the company said.
AstraZeneca said one of the hurdles for advancing combination therapy is the selection of patients who are likely to benefit from specific combinations.
“Many of the single agent drugs under development today are targeted to specific proteins, and are often only effective in tumors with activity in the corresponding pathway. Similarly, the selection of sub-populations using genetic or genomic biomarkers will be critical for the successful administration of combination agents,” AstraZeneca said in a statement.
AstraZeneca said one of the desired results of the research generated through the contest is drug synergy, which it described as “an exaggerated response over and beyond additive effects.”
“Drug synergism has the potential to increase anti-tumor potency without (necessarily) an attendant increase in toxicity, but is very complex to study due to enormous number of potential combinations and their dosages,” AstraZeneca said.
DREAM challenges are run by a community of researchers from a number of different organizations across a number of fields. The idea is to foster a collaborative community by building on professional expertise. The DREAM challenge is designed to explore traits that underline effective combination treatments and synergistic drug behavior using baseline genomic data.
While AstraZeneca is hoping multiple talents will help devise new cancer therapeutics, the company continues to drive new drugs to market through R&D and M&A activities. In August, the company inked a licensing agreement with Heptares Therapeutics for the global rights to HTL-1071 for the treatment of a number of cancers. HTL-1071 is an adenosine A2A receptor antagonist. Adenosine is produced by tumor cells and stimulates A2A receptors, which prevents immune cells, T-cells, from proliferating. HTL-1071 has the potential to block this activity, allowing the body’s immune system to fight cancer cells.