NEW YORK – Israeli precision medicine startup NewStem on Wednesday announced a collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's MSK Innovation Hub to optimize and validate the company's bioinformatics-based cancer diagnostics software. Jerusalem-based NewStem called this collaboration a necessary step toward commercializing the firm's flagship NewStem Software Diagnostic Device (NSDD) product.
The NSDD system is meant to reduce drug resistance in cancer patients by providing oncologists with recommendations about patient-specific tumor profiles to inform therapeutic choices. NSDD is a bioinformatics-based platform that screens human haploid embryonic stem cells for gene mutations involved in chemotherapy resistance.
The MSK Innovation Hub collaboration will focus on patients with triple-negative breast cancer and non-small cell lung cancer who have been treated with paclitaxel and/or carboplatin.
"Despite enormous progress over decades, resistance to anti-cancer drugs continues to be a major problem in treating cancer," NewStem CEO Ayelet Dilion-Mashiah said in a statement.
"We believe that impactful clinical innovations can be achieved through collaborative projects that combine deep clinical knowledge with cutting-edge technical capabilities," added Pedram Razavi, director of liquid biopsy technologies and genomics at MSK. "We look forward to collaborating with NewStem through the MSK Innovation Hub to develop new innovations for bringing better treatments to cancer patients."
NewStem began as a spinout from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with $2 million in seed financing in 2018 from NovelStem International, and a commitment for $2 million more. Last year, NewStem partnered with an unspecified biopharma company to apply its platform to the discovery of new cancer targets and development of cancer immunotherapies.
The firm earned a CE IVD mark for its software earlier this year and also has filed a de novo pre-submission to the US Food and Drug Administration.