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Fundraisings and IPOs

Date: 2017-02-07

Type of information: Grant

Company: OncoSNIPE® consortium (Oncodesign, Expert System, Sword, Acobiom, Hôpitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg, Centre George François Leclerc, Institut Paoli Calmettes)

Investors: Bpifrance (France)

Amount: €7.7 million

Funding type: grant

Planned used:

  • OncoSNIPE® is a programme designed to develop and implement “bio-IT” approaches, drawing on methodologies including artificial intelligence, statistical learning and semantic enrichment to help identify and characterise patients who are resistant to anti-cancer treatments and thus target research and development on specific therapies through the identification of new targets. This R&D will target breast, pancreas and lung cancers. These three cancers are representative of the conditions for the action or emergence of resistance mechanisms in oncology and will give the programme the diversity needed to develop tools for diagnostic and therapeutic targeting.
  • The projected total budget for OncoSNIPE® collaborative programme, including private investment, is €12 million, and the programme will produce 43 direct jobs between 2021 and 2025. Over these 4 years, more than 800 patients will be enrolled in the programme by the academic partners, and 600 will receive an original form of longitudinal monitoring. This will include traditional clinical monitoring as well as NGS genomic monitoring of their tumour (Exom-seq and RNA-seq) and of their blood markers (RNA-seq) at the time of diagnosis, at the time of best therapeutic response and at the time of the emergence of the first signs of resistance. The resulting information, contextualised using semantic enrichment, will be used to model resistance mechanisms, identify biomarkers, discover new therapeutic targets and generate the knowledge needed to create a precision medicine approach dedicated to patients who are resistant to anti-cancer treatments.
  • • On October 18, 2017, Oncodesign and Unicancer have present ed the details of the OncoSNIPE project, which aims to develop and apply artificial intelligence techniques to cancer research. The project was launched officially after it was awarded €7.7 million in financing under the Investments for the Future Programme (Programme d’Investissements d’Avenir, PIA), giving it a total budget of €12 million. The decision by UNICANCER, which combines the 20 French Comprehensive Cancer Centres (FCCCs), to come on board has given the consortium partners access to ConSoRe, a digital 3.0 platform dedicated to cancer. ConSoRe will be significantly enriched by the OncoSNIPE partners through the anonymization of patient records, omic data integration from the clinical trial, identification of similar patients, creation of a link with the tranSMART precision medicine platform and, lastly, identification of patient populations resistant or unresponsive to cancer therapies.
  • The project has been approved by the North-West IV ethics review board, and so a longitudinal clinical trial can be set up enrolling 600 patients in lung cancer, breast cancer and pancreatic cancer—three cancer indications representing sources of resistance and unresponsiveness. This trial will study the molecular profiles associated with unresponsiveness to therapies in patients with these cancers.

Others:

• On February 7, 2017, Oncodesign announced Bpifrance agreement to provide financial support for its strategic OncoSNIPE® programme through the “Investments for the Future Progamme” (Programme d’investissements d’avenir - PIA). The programme, which will last four years, is managed and coordinated by Oncodesign and will bring together four industrial partners with complementary expertise and core businesses – Expert System (Modena, Italy), Sword (Lyon, France), Acobiom (Montpellier, France) and Oncodesign (Dijon, France) – and three French academic institutions – Hôpitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg, Centre George François Leclerc in Dijon and Institut Paoli Calmettes in Marseille, these last two being anti-cancer centres. As a result, and subject to final contractual details being agreed with Bpifrance, the programme will receive government support of €7.7 million in the form of repayable advances and subsidies to be shared between the academic institutions and business partners.

Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology

Is general: Yes