April 8, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
The search to discover and validate the first-ever clinical biomarker to diagnose and treat pancreatic cancer should have a lead candidate in three years, Niven R. Narain, co-founder, president and chief technology officer of Berg, told BioSpace exclusively Thursday.
Calling it an “exciting new part” of a multi-partner collaboration, Berg, a biopharmaceutical focused on biological research, said this week that it would team up with the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, and the Pancreatic Cancer Research Team (PCRT) managed by Cancer Research And Biostatistics (CRAB) to target pancreatic cancer.
It hopes to roll Berg’s lead cancer drug, BPM 31510, into Phase II clinical trials for metastatic pancreatic cancer at more than 48 PCRT sites around the world. The news has been closely watched because BPM 31510 is one of the first cancer drugs to be guided by artificial intelligence—it works by reprogramming the metabolism of cancer cells, re-teaching them to undergo cell death.
Narain told BioSpace that with the schedule currently on track, the team hopes to have a lead biomarker to target by 2018.
“Berg will analyze samples on a rolling schedule,” said Narain. “By the third year, the teams should have a better understanding of the lead candidate biomarker.”
Pancreatic cancer is an undeserved disease, according to The National Cancer Institute (NCI), nearly 47,000 Americans were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2014, a disease from which only 6.7 percent will survive five years. “Pancreatic cancer will become the No. 2 cause of cancer death in the United States within five years, surpassing both breast and colon cancer,” Narain told BioSpace.
That makes finding successful treatments, and possibly even a cure, all the more crucial he said, particularly because there are so few current market options.
“No, there currently aren’t any similar therapies,” said Narain. “The medication, BPM 31510, was discovered and developed through artificial intelligence and is capable of altering cancer cell metabolism.”
As part of the collaboration, the three groups, along with Berg, will design clinical trials and provide both healthy and treated pancreatic tissue, bio-fluids, and treatment results from patients to Berg for analysis using Berg‘s Interrogative Biology platform, which can synthesize trillions of data points per sample.
“Finding a new biomarker will bring real hope to patients with pancreatic cancer. Currently, 70 percent of people with even the smallest pancreatic tumors pass up potentially life-saving treatments,” said James Moser, MD, director of the research team for BIDMC‘s new Pancreas and Liver Institute and a Visiting Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. “We believe that our new collaboration with Berg and the Pancreatic Cancer Research Team represents the dawn of the kind of precision medicine needed to beat this terrible disease.”
BioSpace Temperature Poll
After last week’s news that Gilead had issued a health advisory to doctors, concern is growing after nine patients taking Harvoni or Sovaldi along with another drug, amiodarone, were treated for abnormally slow heartbeats. One of the patients died of cardiac arrest. Three of the nine patients required a pacemaker. That has BioSpace asking, what next?
