NEW YORK — Swiss cancer liquid biopsy firm Novigenix said Monday that it has received a €1.8 million ($1.9 million) grant from the European Union to participate in a recently launched consortium focused on the validation of prostate and bladder cancer biomarkers.
Launched earlier this month, EU-funded BRECISE — short for Biomarker Research and Evaluation for Clinical Implementation and Supporting Systems Enhancement — aims to work with research institutes, hospitals, biotech companies, and regulatory agencies to advance cancer biomarker development. By leveraging new technologies such as next-generation sequencing, AI, and ex vivo patient models, the five-year project hopes to improve personalized cancer care within European healthcare systems.
Novigenix said it will use the grant funding to provide its know-how and technologies to the research program, including its Liquid Immuno-Transcriptomics (LITO)Seek liquid biopsy platform.
LITOSeek, unveiled about a year ago, combines machine learning with a proprietary database of curated patient clinical profiles and corresponding RNA-seq data to help with the early detection of cancer, as well as to predict patient treatment response.
"Our contribution [to BRECISE] is to bring the expertise we have built over a decade of developing AI-powered liquid biopsy solutions, including LITOSeek, which provides unparalleled predictive insights into immune response to tumor biology and therapy resistance through the integration of transcriptomic and genomic biomarkers with advanced AI modeling," Novigenix CEO Brian Hashemi said in a statement.
In late September, Novigenix said that it had won a €1.75 million Eurostars grant to develop a sequencing-based liquid biopsy test for guiding the treatment of aggressive prostate cancer.