OncoImmunity is pleased to announce that it has been awarded prestigious funding from the BIA program. The goal of this project is to develop OncoImmunity's innovative machine-learning platform to predict neoantigen-based immune responses from non-invasive liquid biopsies. The outcome will be a tool that can generate a holistic view of a tumor's neoantigen landscape from a drop of blood. The platform will improve patient stratification, monitoring and also broaden the repertoire of targets that can be engineered into personalized cancer vaccines and CAR-T-cells. OncoImmunity will apply the platform to identify biomarkers on immunotherapy data from sarcoma patients with the group of professor Ola Myklebost at the University of Bergen.
About OncoImmunity:
OncoImmunity is a machine-learning company offering proprietary technology to address the key knowledge gaps in the prediction of bone fide immunogenic neoantigens for personalized cancer immunotherapy. OncoImmunity's software facilitates effective patient selection for cancer immunotherapy, and identifies optimal neoantigen targets for truly personalized cancer vaccines & cell therapies in a clinically actionable time-frame.
About the Myklebost Lab:
The Myklebost lab has focused on the biology and preclinical studies on connective tissue tumours, - sarcomas, for 30 years, until recently at OUS Norwegian Radium Hospital, and now at the University of Bergen and Haukeland University Hospital, where he is a partner of the recently awarded KG Jebsen Centre for Genome-directed Cancer Therapy. He is the head of the Norwegian Cancer Genomics Consortium and the Norwegian Sarcoma Consortium, which have collected and sequenced all genes (the "exomes") of a large population-based biobank of sarcoma samples from across Norway. Liquid biospies have been collected from all these patients, which will be used to investigate the presence of antibodies against tumour-associated neoantigens indicated from the exome analysis and further expression studies.
About BIA:
The user-driven research innovation program (BIA) promotes world-class innovation by providing support for R&D projects, based on the awarded company's promising challenges and their unique strategy to overcome them. The BIA program is the Research Council of Norway's primary instrument for funding for all segments of trade and industry seeking to become more innovative, competitive and internationally oriented through R&D. The grant is awarded across all domains of science and technology, and a total of NOK 483 million was allocated to this current call.
For further information please contact:
Trevor Clancy (CSO, OncoImmunity): trevor@oncoimmunity.com
Ola Myklebost (Professor, University of Bergen): ola.myklebost@uib.no
