UK -- Horizon Discovery today announced that it is to be part of a new four year EUFP7 personalized medicine consortium.
The Personalised RNA Interference to Enhance the Delivery of Individualised Cytotoxic and Targeted therapeutics (PREDICT) Consortium was established in 2009 to coordinate single drug clinical trials with personalised tumour functional genomic analysis to define patient-specific drug sensitivity pathways and biomarkers predictive of drug response.
The consortium integrates expertise in renal carcinoma clinical trial recruitment, whole genome sequencing technologies, ex vivo cancer cell line cultures and personalised rna interference screening technologies. Partners include; The Technical Universit of Denmark, Cancer Research UK, The Welcome Trust Sanger Institute, Institut of Gustave Rousey, The Royal Marsden NHS Trust and global Pharma Bayer.
PREDICT will define the next generation of predictive biomarkers through the integration of clinical trial design with functional cancer genomics to enable personalised medicine and the cost-effective delivery of beneficial cancer therapeutics.
Horizon Discovery will develop novel human isogenic disease models that can be used to predict the activity of potential therapeutic agents in patients harboring specific genetic biomarkers identified in the program. The data generated could be used in combination with patient data to determine the make-up of new clinical trials.
Dr Chris Torrance, CEO of Horizon said “There is now an abundance of information of how cancer arises and progresses and we also know that onset, progression and drug response to drugs is substantially different from one patient to another. Consequently, the old ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to cancer drug development and prescription will need to move towards a more ‘targeted’ or ‘personalised’ paradigm." He goes on to say " defining what patients should be selected for clinical trials based upon predictive biomarker data is a holy grail in personalized medicine and Horizon is delighted to be part of this world-class consortium".
Horizon has been awarded €300,000 out of the €4,500,000 4 year funding awarded to the PREDICT consortium under the EUFP7 program.
This is Horizons second grant award in the past six months having been awarded $500,000 under the Eureka program for its successful Eurostars submission INSIGHT.
More information on the consortium can be found at http://www.predictconsortium.eu/