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According to statistics from the National Cancer Institute, one in five men and one in six women in the United States are likely to die from cancer during their lifetime.

This year alone, the American Cancer Society estimates were in for a rough ride. In 2023, more than 1.9 million new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in the U.S., and nearly 610,000 are expected to die from cancer in the U.S. (about 1,670 deaths per day). Only heart disease outranks cancer, making cancer the second most common cause of death in the nation.

These chilling statistics make it clear why something must be done to save more lives from this hydra of a disease.

The founders of Known Medicine couldnt agree more. In 2020, the team launched the startup as a company dedicated to expediting the development of cancer treatments. As explained on its website, Known Medicines machine learning-based sensitivity assay, paired with -omics data, allows [the company] to identify predictive biomarkers and the most likely responders for any new drug.

Put in simpler terms, Katie-Rose Skelly, co-founder and CTO of Known Medicine, says the company is essentially trying to find out beforehand which patients will respond to which drug. This can help pharmaceutical companies design better clinical trials and improve the drugs chances for success.

To conduct its research, Known Medicine works closely with about 10 different cancer research centers that provide samples from patients who have authorized their use for research. The company breaks these tissue samples down into thousands of microtumors and doses each microtumor with a panel of over 100 drugs to see what works for each individual patient. The drugs include some that have already been approved, some that have failed previous clinical trials, some that pharmaceutical partners are interested in and some that Known Medicine might consider for in-licensing.

The Known Medicine team is currently working toward its first peer-reviewed journal publication, which will essentially provide proof of concept for the innovative work the company is doing. What well be able to show is that we can look at the patient that donated the tissue, see what drug they were given, see how they responded and identify whether that matches what we would have expected, Skelly says.

In other words, the initial publication will prove that Known Medicine can replicate patient responses and that its microtumors are a faithful representation of what the patients cells will do in the body.

From there, Known Medicines goal will be to aid in the drug development process. Skelly explains that most drugs currently fail in clinical trials, with just 3.4 percent of oncology drugs making it to market. This is often due to ineffective patient population selection.

If you try running a new anticancer drug on 100 patients, maybe 20 or 30 respond wellbetter than they would have to any other drug, Skelly says. But if you cant identify that 20 percent to 30 percent upfront, your drug is going to fail clinical trials.

Known Medicines platform will enable drug companies to identify trial candidates that are more likely to respond to their drugs. We can look at what kind of genetic signatures [patients] have, what kind of RNA expression levels they have, Skelly says. We can see if there is anything they can use to separate the patients who will respond from the patients who wont and only enroll the people who will respond in the clinical trials.

The concept for the company came as a collaboration between Skelly and Dr. Andrea Mazzocchi, who serves as the companys CEO. The co-founders initially met by chanceSkelly was working as a data scientist at Recursion, a Utah-based drug discovery digital biology company. Mazzocchi was pursuing her doctorate degree at Wake Forest and happened to be dating Skellys best friend at Recursion.

Read the rest here:
Known Medicine is using machine learning to cure cancer - Utah Business