Repositive has announced that UK-based personalised therapeutics company Vivan Therapeutics will join its network of cancer model partners.
Vivan Therapeutics is a personalised therapeutics company that engineers drosophila ‘avatar’ models for cancer research and development. Its technology engineers the genetic complexity of a cancer patient’s unique tumour network (up to 20 mutations or alterations) into 500,000 fruit flies. This can then be screened for responses to up to 2,000 FDA approved drugs (including non-cancer drugs) and investigational drugs, to identify drug combinations that are efficacious in the individual’s personalised fly population.
The Vivan Therapeutics platform can also screen novel molecules for efficacy and toxicity, discover novel combinations, develop a biomarker strategy, and enable the repurposing of existing drugs.
The Repositive partnership is expanding Vivan Therapeutics’ personalised medicine capabilities to support more biopharma customers in their oncology drug development programmes.
Repositive’s services are said to save researchers months to years by connecting them to the right cancer models in a much faster timeframe. Catherine McDermott, CEO of Repositive, said: “With cancer research becoming more and more focused around personalised medicine, we know it is important to keep expanding our offering in this area and partnering with Vivan is allowing us to do so”.
“Our avatars allow us to do what no other model can – replicate polygenic tumour complexity in a living, biological system for high throughput drug screening. Our library of personalised drosophila models is ever expanding, and we can also create custom models for biopharma clients. We are excited to become part of the Repositive network to provide our cancer models and services to the global academic and commercial development community.” said Laura Towart, CEO of Vivan Therapeutics.
