On September 23, 2020 Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) reported that its executives will be speaking at the following investor conference and invited investors to participate via webcast (Press release, Illumina, SEP 23, 2020, View Source [SID1234565533]).

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Cowen’s Liquid Biopsy Summit
Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 9:30am Pacific Time

The live webcasts can be accessed in the Investor Info section of Illumina’s web site under the "company" tab at www.illumina.com. A replay of the presentations will be posted on Illumina’s website after the event and will be available for at least 30 days following.

On September 23, 2020 OncoImmune, Inc. reported that it has dosed the first patient in the first-in-human clinical trial of ONC-392, its novel, next generation anti-CTLA-4 antibody, at the University of California (UC) Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center on September 16, 2020 (Press release, ONCOIMMUNE, SEP 23, 2020, View Source [SID1234565532]). This is a Phase 1A/1B clinical trial designed to assess the safety, pharmacokinetics, and clinical activity of ONC-392 as a single agent in advanced solid tumors and in combination with anti-PD(L)1 standard of care therapy in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. In Phase IA, patients with solid tumors that are refractory to available therapies will be recruited. Cancer patients enrolled in the trial will receive increasing doses of ONC-392 based on his/her tolerance to the drug and anti-tumor effect of the immunotherapy.

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Early/Late Stage Pipeline Development - Target Scouting - Clinical Biomarkers - Indication Selection & Expansion - BD&L Contacts - Conference Reports - Combinatorial Drug Settings - Companion Diagnostics - Drug Repositioning - First-in-class Analysis - Competitive Analysis - Deals & Licensing

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ONC-392 was developed based on decades of fundamental research on CTLA-4 biology and immunotherapy by OncoImmune’s Founders, Drs. Yang Liu and Pan Zheng who proposed a new theory to improve both the efficacy and safety of immunotherapy drugs. Unlike other anti-CTLA-4 antibodies that induce CTLA-4 degradation and thus weaken immune tolerance and cause immunotherapy-associated adverse events (irAE), ONC-392 preserves the CTLA-4 immune checkpoint for safer and more effective immunotherapy.

OncoImmune is enormously grateful to Dr. Tianhong Li, a leading medical Oncologist and associate professor at UC Davis, for her wealth of experience in immunotherapy, especially in lung cancer, and her colleagues at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center for being the first site to open the trial. "CTLA-4 is an important but challenging immunotherapeutic target. This study is important as we look at this new generation anti-CTLA-4 antibody, which potentially could benefit all cancer patients who are candidates for cancer immunotherapy," said Dr. Li.

On September 23, 2020 Accenture (NYSE: ACN) reported that it has built a data and analytics approach to manage and derive insights from pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) genomic data (Press release, Accenture, SEP 23, 2020, View Source [SID1234565531]). Working in collaboration with researchers and clinicians from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Fred Hutch), and the Target Pediatric AML (TpAML) computational working group, a large-scale research project which supplied the data, this new approach aims to enable pediatric oncology physicians and researchers — specifically those focused on pediatric AML — to better analyze patient clinical trial and genetic data, with the potential to improve precision medicine.

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In collaboration with the TpAML investigators, led by Dr. Soheil Meshinchi at Fred Hutch, Accenture data scientists aggregated and standardized anonymized genomic and clinical data from over 2,000 children with AML, treated in clinical trials. RNA data alone, one of the most critical indicators of treatment outcomes in precision medicine, amounts to over 48,000 columns per patient if managed in a standard table format. Combined with other relevant data points — such as patient demographics, clinical treatment arm, and prognosis — the sheer volume and variety of combinations presents a significant hurdle to comparing patient profiles and outcomes at scale.

"The Accenture data scientists who worked with the TpAML team had the clinical and genomic background knowledge to hit the ground running. We model this type of collaboration in all of our engagements so that we’re able to anticipate challenges and navigate them with speed," said Joe Depa, a managing director for Accenture Applied Intelligence. "In this case particularly, I am pleased that we were able to leverage the power of data and analytics to make this information more accessible to researchers, potentially advancing precision medicine and helping improve people’s lives."

Through this engagement, TpAML investigators provided access to the sequencing data and guidance on key data points — including genetic markers, clinical trial treatment details, and clinical outcomes — that can define a patient’s response to a particular treatment at the time of diagnosis (prior to the start of chemotherapy). These insights could help inform the recommended course of treatment, giving patients and physicians a more robust view of likely clinical success and side effects with standard therapy, based on an individual patient’s genetic makeup and medical history. This approach may provide a more informed pathway to more effective precision medicine for pediatric AML, where therapy might be modified based on patients’ predicted response to standard therapy – i.e., high-risk patients may be allocated to bone marrow transplantation or targeted therapies.

"Integration of genomic and clinical data and getting it into a usable, accessible format is a significant challenge in precision medicine," said Dr. Meshinchi. "This collaborative effort between TpAML investigators and Accenture data scientists provides a mechanism to more informed analysis of clinical and genomic data, and could help identify patients at high risk of failure with conventional treatments. Validation of these findings can help modify patients’ treatments based on their relapse risk."

By applying data science and engineering tools, such as Alteryx and Python, and machine learning libraries like scikit-learn, to this corpus of information, Accenture was able to create a code base that clinicians are using to model, understand and potentially predict how patients may respond to specific treatments. Data was made further accessible and consumable using Unity 3D visualization, offering a more interactive way to view the data in a game-space environment, laying a foundation for advanced, dynamic visualizations and VR experiences which could help clinicians potentially identify anomalies, or which they could use as an interface to present findings.

"For years, patients diagnosed with a disease often received the same treatment. And for some people, that treatment worked. However, for others, it did not work – or did so only marginally, or with serious side effects. With genome mapping, in combination with new analytical, scientific and technological advances, it is possible to develop targeted, more precise, personalized treatments for individuals or similar patient populations," explained Stuart Henderson, global Life Sciences lead for Accenture. "Precision oncology is delivering on the promise of better patient care and health outcomes in remarkable ways and we look forward to seeing more projects like this TpAML investigation."

This project builds on Accenture research underscoring the importance of data management and sharing to drive precision oncology, and the role of data and genomics in biopharmaceutical development.

On September 23, 2020 The Arizona Bioindustry Association (AZBio) reported that Systems Oncology, LLC, an AI-based cancer therapy discovery and development company, was honored during Arizona Bioscience Week with a 2020 AZBio Fast Lane Award (Press release, Systems Oncology, SEP 23, 2020, View Source [SID1234565530]). Systems Oncology’s work was featured in Celebrating Life & Science, a one-hour television special which aired on September 16, 2020 (CW61-Phoenix) and September 18, 2020 (ABC15) and is now available online.

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"We have made tremendous advances in cancer treatment in the last 20 years, but for all of our progress, there are still too many cancer patients waiting for us to discover the precise treatment that will be effective for their unique cancer," stated AZBio president & CEO Joan Koerber-Walker. "AZBio honored Systems Oncology with a 2020 AZBio Fast Lane Award in recognition of their ability to speed up the process of identifying promising new treatments so that in the future we will have the more effective medicines available when patients need them."

Working to discover a new drug is one of the most challenging scientific pursuits. The Human Genome Project promised to accelerate our understanding of humans and to uncover the genetic basis of diseases. In the case of cancers, however, multiple complex genomic changes occur as cancer cells evolve, and these genetic changes cooperate in complex control systems that are, in many cases, not fully understood yet. The numbers of ways molecular changes in cancer genomes can interact in complex cellular control systems is larger than the multitude of stars in the universe, and far beyond what the human imagination can process or comprehend.

Systems Oncology has a multidisciplinary team of scientists and a revolutionary cognitive computing platform (Expansive.AI) that is able to intelligently integrate, model, and mine big data from hundreds of molecular, genomic, and biomedical datasets.

In 2019, the company moved its headquarters to the Biomedical Collaborative Research Building in Scottsdale, Arizona to house its growing team and to expand its research infrastructure and capacity. A major investment from The Pritzker Organization is helping to support the company’s growth and its rapidly expanding pipeline of innovative cancer therapeutics.

"This new kind of computational data mining has empowered our team to rapidly extract many therapeutically useful insights from complex multi-scalar systems models of cancer biology," stated Spyro Mousses, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of Systems Oncology. "This scalable data-driven approach enables our team to translate many unique biological insights into dozens of discovery projects and research collaborations with leading universities, producing one of the fastest growing pipelines of innovative cancer therapies in the industry."

Systems Oncology has taken on this important challenge using a next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform for translating massively complex scientific data into useful biological insights and novel cancer therapies with unprecedented speed, scale, and precision.

Systems Oncology’s team of world-class experts come from fields ranging from mathematics and AI to systems biology in order to combine multi-scalar systems modeling with machine learning and big-data. This unique combination of talent and technology has successfully uncovered multiple breakthrough therapeutic insights into cancer biology. The Systems Oncology team then draws on its deep scientific and clinical experience to translate those novel insights to discover and develop innovative therapeutics with curative potential.

Today, Systems Oncology is managing a rapidly growing pipeline of more than 10 innovative cancer therapeutic programs, many of which are being developed collaboratively through partnerships with leading academic partners worldwide. They then form industry partnerships with pharmaceutical companies who advance the programs through regulatory and commercialization success. One example of this is an out-licensing collaboration with Toray, a public Japanese company, on a novel drug that is projected to be effective across many cancer indications.

The team at Systems Oncology also recently was able to close an exclusive global license agreement with pharmaceutical giant Bayer to advance ERSO, a compound in pre-clinical development for metastatic Estrogen Receptor (ER) positive breast cancer, an area where new therapies are urgently required. This investigational treatment has the potential to help many patients, as breast cancer is the second leading tumor type, with 70% of those cases being ER-positive. Under the terms of the agreement, Bayer will be responsible for developing and commercializing ERSO globally. Systems Oncology will receive an upfront payment of 25 million US dollars and is eligible to receive payments from Bayer upon achievement of certain development, and commercialization milestones totaling 345 million US dollars, as well as royalties on future global net sales.

Systems Oncology has earned a reputation as a top AI-drug discovery company. The team has been invited to present at prestigious conferences and Systems Oncology has been featured in multiple industry reports.

On September 23, 2020 Immetas Therapeutics reported it has raised a Series A financing of $11 million to advance research on inflammation pathways in aging and the development of novel, immune modulating treatments for cancer and inflammatory disease (Press release, Immetas Therapeutics, SEP 23, 2020, View Source [SID1234565529]). Morningside Ventures was the sole investor in the financing round.

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"Morningside’s investment is a significant endorsement of our approach to targeting inflammation pathways in aging and our clinical evidence-based discovery strategy," said J. Gene Wang, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO. "Emerging research that molecular pathways driving both aging and age-related diseases converge around chronic, low grade inflammation is creating a new set of opportunities to treat cancer and other serious diseases. Immetas is well positioned to capitalize on these new advances."

Dr. Wang added, "Our approach prioritizes clinical evidence and a deep interrogation of disease mechanisms to guide drug discovery. This strategy is designed to reduce development risk resulting from the ‘translational’ gap between laboratory findings and patients and ensure the development of superior and well-differentiated drugs."

Dr. Wang co-founded Immetas after a 20-year career at large pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Abbott, GSK and Novartis, where he played integral roles in the successful development of major drugs, including Humira (adalimumab), Varubi (rolapitant), Zolinza (vorinostat) and Gardasil (human papilloma virus vaccine), and led multiple programs from discovery to clinical proof-of-concept. Dr. Wang received his M.D. from Peking University Medical Center and Ph.D. in Immunobiology from Yale University, followed by medical residency training at Yale New Haven Hospital.

Immetas other co-founder, Dr. David Sinclair, is an internationally recognized scientist known for his research on genes and small molecules that delay aging, including Sirtuin genes, resveratrol and NAD precursors. He was among TIME magazine’s "50 Most Influential People in Healthcare" in 2018. Dr. Sinclair is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard and he serves as a science advisor to the Company.

"We have a shared vision that inflammation is the fundamental and ultimate process driving aging and age-related cancers and inflammatory diseases," said Dr. Sinclair. "Our approach is distinct from others that have targeted conventional age-related pathways and to date have proved challenging."

The Company is building a pipeline of biologic and small molecule drugs internally and through collaborations. Immetas’ lead program is aimed at designing a series of bi-specific antibodies to regulate inflammation in the tumor microenvironment and overcome resistance to conventional immune checkpoint therapies.

In connection with the financing, Dr. Lu Huang, MD, MBA, Managing Director at Morningside Ventures, joined the Immetas board of directors. Since joining Morningside in 2003, Dr. Huang has led nearly three dozen healthcare / life science investments in China and the United States.