DIJON, France--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Oncodesign (Paris:ALONC) (ALONC – FR0011766229), a biopharmaceutical group specialized in precision medicine, and UNICANCER present the details of the OncoSNIPE project, which aims to develop and apply artificial intelligence techniques to cancer research. The project was launched officially after it was awarded €7.7 million in financing under the Investments for the Future Programme (Programme d’Investissements d’Avenir, PIA), giving it a total budget of €12 million.

The decision by UNICANCER, which combines the 20 French Comprehensive Cancer Centres (FCCCs), to come on board has given the consortium partners access to ConSoRe, a digital 3.0 platform dedicated to cancer. ConSoRe will be significantly enriched by the OncoSNIPE partners through the anonymization of patient records, omic data integration from the clinical trial, identification of similar patients, creation of a link with the tranSMART precision medicine platform and, lastly, identification of patient populations resistant or unresponsive to cancer therapies.

“The aim is to improve modelling of resistance to oncology therapies through contextualization of clinical data, omics and imaging through the enrichment of relevant metadata from patient records”, said Philippe Genne, Founder and CEO of Oncodesign. “Once this project has been completed, Oncodesign will be able to identify new targets to address treatment resistance and unresponsiveness, making it a powerful catalyst for our Discovery activities, through both partnerships and licensing programs. This technology is crucial for precision medicine, an area in which we are looking to expand very substantially in the coming years.”

“The OncoSNIPE project is highly innovative and holds out the promise of better care for patients who are resistant to classic therapies”, added Pascale Flamant, UNICANCER’s Managing Director. “To complete this project, UNICANCER is delighted to be making its ConSoRe tool available to the Consortium, and it will in future permit its installation in healthcare establishments other than just the comprehensive cancer centres.”

The project has been approved by the North-West IV ethics review board, and so a longitudinal clinical trial can be set up enrolling 600 patients in lung cancer, breast cancer and pancreatic cancer—three cancer indications representing sources of resistance and unresponsiveness. This trial will study the molecular profiles associated with unresponsiveness to therapies in patients with these cancers.

About OncoSNIPE

OncoSNIPE® is a program designed to develop and implement “bio-IT” approaches, drawing on methodologies including artificial intelligence, statistical learning and semantic enrichment to help identify and characterize patients who are resistant to anti-cancer treatments and thus target research and development on specific therapies through the identification of new targets. OncoSNIPE® will enable Oncodesign to generate new research pathways for its Experimentation and Discovery activities.

The program, which will last four years, is managed and coordinated by Oncodesign and will bring together four industrial partners with complementary expertise and core businesses – Expert System (Modena, Italy), Sword (Lyon, France), Acobiom (Montpellier, France) and Oncodesign (Dijon, France) – and four French academic institutions – UNICANCER, Hôpitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg, Centre George François Leclerc in Dijon and Institut Paoli Calmettes in Marseille, these last two being FCCCs.

About UNICANCER

UNICANCER groups together all the French Comprehensive Cancer Centres (FCCCs). These 20 private, non-profit health establishments are exclusively dedicated to care, research and education in cancer. UNICANCER also aims to facilitate the pooling of resources, expertise and best practice between FCCCs in the areas of research, care, hospital management, and procurement. Its mission is to enable FCCCs to stay ahead and innovate together, and always for the benefit of their patients.

As a clinical research sponsor, UNICANCER has shored up its position as a major French player in oncology. It is accredited by the Ministry of Health and is eligible for public grants. Its research unit is tasked with implementing UNICANCER’s overall research strategy, which involves promoting access to innovation and improving care for patients with cancer. In 2016, 5,400 patients were included in UNICANCER sponsored clinical trials within 270 healthcare establishments, 20% of which abroad.

UNICANCER 2016 key figures: 20 healthcare establishments, 19,000 employees, €2.4 billion in revenue, more than 500 ongoing clinical trials, over 135,000 patients hospitalized per year. For further information: UNICANCER’s 2016 activity report and www.unicancer.fr.

About ONCODESIGN: www.oncodesign.com

Founded over 20 years ago by Dr Philippe Genne, the Company’s CEO and Chairman, Oncodesign is a biopharma company dedicated to the precision medicine. With its unique experience acquired by working with more than 600 clients, including the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, along with its comprehensive technological platform combining state-of-the-art medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, regulated bioanalysis and medical imaging, Oncodesign is able to predict and identify, at a very early stage, each molecule's therapeutic usefulness and potential to become an effective drug. Applied to kinase inhibitors, which represent a market estimated at over $46 billion in 2016 and accounting for almost 25% of the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D expenditure, Oncodesign’s technology has already enabled the targeting of several promising molecules with substantial therapeutic potential, in oncology and elsewhere, along with partnerships with pharmaceutical groups such as Bristol-Myers Squibb and UCB. Oncodesign is based in Dijon, France, in the heart of the town’s university and hospital hub, and within the Paris-Saclay cluster, Oncodesign has 215 employees and subsidiaries in Canada and the USA.

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