Tuvik Beker, CEO of Pangea Biomed, is looking for more accurate biomarkers for oncology to determine better who might benefit from a specific drug. Their ENLIGHT platform is a pan-cancer, pan-treatment response predictor and can be used to find the best patient populations to give a new drug. They are also working with bio-pharma companies on improving the identification of novel targets through better biomarkers, better patient stratification, and combination therapy optimization.
Tuvik elaborates, "Rather than looking at the genome and looking for abnormalities in gene coding, those rare fusions, or actionable mutations, what Pangea is doing is looking at the way genes are activated in the tumor."
"And this turns out to be a much, much more common abnormality in cancer tumor cells. So almost any tumor cell that you would examine, you would find hundreds and even thousands of genes that are normally encoded. So they have no mutations, they are wild-type genes, and yet they are abnormally expressed in the tumor compared with normal tissue. And the question is, of course, how do we harness this common abnormality of expression into effective therapies? So, there is where our technological uniqueness comes in."
"And that's really what we are hoping for in the long run because ENLIGHT is not only a way to say generally, qualitatively, whether a particular drug would be good or not. It can actually rank and compare different therapies in a way that gives the treating physician a very clear map of what the available treatments are and what should be considered or is the ultimate decision a clinical one. So we are just dealing with treatment elimination but in a very informed manner."
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