Cancer is a challenging disease, with patients rarely having the same response to identical treatments due to the genetic variation of an individual’s tumor. Until recently, cancer treatment was mainly focused on fighting a 'type' or origin of cancer. With the introduction of personalized medicine, doctors can employ molecular profiling techniques, such as next generation DNA sequencing, to identify mutations inside each patient's tumor.
EMPOWER YOUR ONCOLOGIST WITH PERSONALIZED MEDICINE
Unfortunately, only 2% of cancer patients today use personalized medicine to treat their cancer. This is mainly because there is just too much information for the oncologist to process and use.
Bionov™ guides oncologists in the selection of personalized cancer treatment options, using supercomputing and the latest discoveries in genomics and proteomics. Bionov™ analyzes the top cancer treatments for each patient, based on the molecular profile of their tumor cells, and provides a report with a ranked list of customized treatment options.
The latest advances in cancer care are considered in the analysis, including combination therapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, hormone therapy, and newly-approved cancer drugs.
COMBINATION THERAPY
Combination therapy has been widely used for treatment and/or prevention of other diseases, such as infectious diseases, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease, and has proven to be particularly effective for the treatment of HIV/AIDS.
Until now, even combination therapy has not yet been widely available for oncology, primarily because there are millions of possible drug combinations which are difficult for oncologists and tumor boards to analyze.
CureMatch® is the only company to guide oncologists in the selection of Personalized Combination Therapy, in which combinations of drugs are selected to best target each of the patient’s tumor mutations.
Bionov™ uses a personalized medicine approach to cancer treatment based on tumor profiling (such as next-generation DNA sequencing). This must be performed to identify the mutations specific to an individual patient’s cancer. This data requires your medical team to take a biopsy of the tumor or blood, and have the sample sent to a third party company for processing and annotation. This step of the process might be covered by insurance.
When tumor profiling data is provided to CureMatch® a computational analysis can be performed to rank matched drug therapies by combinations most likely to be successful. CureMatch’s comprehensive set of databases with a custom filtering and scoring algorithm yields a report for your oncologist’s review to help identify a treatment plan which is personalized just for your particular cancer.
HOW DOES BIONOV™ HELP YOUR ONCOLOGIST?
It would likely take days for your oncologist to sort through the latest FDA approved drugs and decide what combinations of drugs could provide the best outcomes based on your genomic results. Bionov™ provides a clear report layout of ranked combination drug therapies targeting your cancer at the genomic level regardless of the diagnosed ‘type’ of cancer. This report is designed to provide the concise actionable knowledge and insights your oncologist or care team needs to make the most appropriate decisions for your upcoming cancer drug treatment.
Today, doctors are able to target the unique nature of an individual patient’s tumor, by matching treatments at the molecular level; resulting in improved outcomes. A recent study conducted by the CureMatch team found that patients with advanced cancers treated using the traditional or standard of care, which is based on their type or origin of cancer rather than their molecular tumor profile, had a mere 5% response rate to their treatment.
When patients with advanced cancers were treated using a personalized approach, matching them at the molecular level, there was a 27% response rate. This is personalized medicine. And it is available now.
Why personalized combination therapy?
Cancer has historically been treated using standard, single-drug therapies to target specific cancers, and even when using personalized cancer therapy, the vast majority of treatments are performed using targeted monotherapies. Though far superior to standard therapies in that a tumor’s genetic mutation is matched to a specific drug therapy, monotherapies are also deficient in that it is rare that a cancerous tumor has only one mutation that requires a matching therapy. Recently, it has been shown that when the right combination of multiple drugs is used to match multiple mutations, cancer treatment is more effective.
Each drug is able to target individual cancer mutations to improve treatment, and each drug can be used with the right dose to reduce side effects. Until now, matched combination therapy was not available outside of research, mainly because there are millions of possible drug combinations that are difficult for doctors to analyze. That is where CureMatch comes in. Our goal is to make matched combination therapy a clinical reality for oncologists and patients worldwide.
What is Personalized Combination Therapy?
CureMatch’s personalized combination therapy approach can be illustrated using a simple example, using cancer cell lines derived from the tumors of patients. In a simple example, we show cell lines from human pancreatic adenocarcinoma tumors with eight mutations, two of which were “actionable” – meaning that these two mutations were known to be responsive to a specific drug.
Although the standard of care for this type of cancer is treatment with gemcitabine—the most commonly used chemotherapy in the treatment of pancreatic adenocarcinoma—the CureMatch platform instead recommended a combination of two specific drugs (“Drug A” and “Drug B”)* to simultaneously target the two actionable mutations.
In order to assess the efficacy of the recommended treatment, four scenarios were compared: (1) standard chemotherapy (gemcitabine); (2) personalized monotherapy using Drug A only; (3) personalized monotherapy using Drug B only; and (4) personalized combination therapy using both Drug A and B (the CureMatch-recommended therapy). A graphic representation of these four scenarios is shown below, with the two actionable mutations shown on the DNA strands as blue and white circles.
The effects of the drug treatments were measured using a cell viability assay, which measures the number of living cells remaining after treatment. Personalized Combination Therapy (the CureMatch-recommended therapy), at 1:1 concentrations of Drug A:Drug B, not only resulted in a significant increase in cell death compared to the matched monotherapies (3-5 fold increase), but also in a significant increase in cell death when compared to standard chemotherapy (>20-fold increase).
This in vitro data supports the notion that combinations of drugs specifically “matched” to actionable mutations present in a patient’s tumor have the potential to provide greatly improved outcomes compared not only to standard chemotherapy but to matched monotherapy. This the basis of the CureMatch approach.
A core principle behind the CureMatch® technology was selected by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) as a major achievement in clinical cancer research and care. ASCO recognized a recently published study by co-founder and Chief Medical Advisor, Dr. Razelle Kurzrock in Clinical Cancer Advances 2017, its annual review of progress against cancer and emerging trends in the field.
