Auron and Elucidata Launch AI Driven Collaboration to Identify Targets for Differentiation-Based Oncology Therapies

Auron Therapeutics and Elucidata Corporation on 12/19/18 announced a scientific collaboration using Elucidata’s AI-based target discovery platform to identify and validate targets for differentiation9-based therapy for Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and eight other oncology indications. As part of this collaboration, Elucidata will use its data analytics platform PollyTM, to analyze transcriptomic, metabolomic and epigenetic data from biological samples, as well as disease and treatment response data from patients. This four-year collaboration is among the broadest efforts to date to apply the differentiation-based approach for oncology therapies and has the potential to improve outcomes for patients living with these diseases.

Elucidata’s AI-based platform combines different forms of omics data using advanced computational analysis techniques to characterize healthy and diseased states at the molecular level. Auron will provide phenotypic data along with transcriptomic, metabolomic and epigenetic data from hundreds of patient samples which will be analyzed on PollyTM to identify and validate targets to develop new therapies with improved treatment efficacy and minimal side effects for a subgroup of patients. The insights generated from this collaboration will further enable stratification of subtypes of different cancers.

“I am extremely impressed by the PollyTM platform that Elucidata has built and the power it has to digest, integrate and analyze large data sets,” said Kate Yen, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Auron Therapeutics. “The unique partnership that we have allows us to work hand-in-hand with the software engineers, scientists, and program managers to rapidly develop novel hypotheses which we can test in the lab. In just a short period of time, we have made significant progress that has had a substantial impact on Auron’s growth.”

“With our platform, we are seeking to develop an atlas of differentiation paths of healthy and diseased cells that will help us identify and characterize disease mechanisms,” said Abhishek Jha, Co-founder and CEO of Elucidata. “This collaboration with Auron is an incredible opportunity to realize the promise of big data analytics to discover new targets that will deliver more precise medicine to patients.”
    
Auron Therapeutics was founded in 2018 to develop therapies to cure cancer by radically changing the paradigm of cancer therapeutics from cell killing, to transformation of malignant cells into normal cells. This transformation, called differentiation therapy, reactivates endogenous cellular programs to elicit tumor cell maturation and the transition from cancer to normal tissue. Its unique platforms allow for integration of large-omic datasets and miniaturized high throughput flow cytometry to rapidly identify and validate multiple targets and drugs in primary human patient samples.