SALT LAKE CITY & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Culmination Bio, a new Intermountain Health Company, and Cofactor Genomics, a predictive diagnostic immunotherapy company, today announced a partnership to leverage samples and data from one of the largest biobanks in the country to fuel the development of Cofactor Genomic’s OncoPrism™ test in 11 cancers.
The objective of the partnership is to build biomarkers for cancers being studied in the national PREDAPT (Predicting Immunotherapy Efficacy From Analysis of Pre-treatment Tumor Biopsies) clinical trial. The companies’ relationship is initially focused on studying OncoPrism in cancers of the head, neck and lung, and will soon expand into nine other indications for which the study is approved, including triple-negative breast, cervical, colorectal, esophageal, gastric, kidney, liver, and urothelial cancers. Early readouts for the head and neck cancer biomarker show that Cofactor’s approach is twice as accurate as the PD-L1 biomarker in finding the subset of patients who respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors.
Cofactor’s OncoPrism assay is a laboratory-developed test powered by a sophisticated, multidimensional immune biomarker built to predict which cancer patients are likely responders to monotherapy of immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as Keytruda.
Clinical trials for new cancer drugs have proliferated in the last few years, but only a subset of patients successfully responds to these newer classes of immunotherapies that harness the patient's immune response to fight cancer.
“The goal of this partnership is to innovate and build predictive diagnostics that match the right patients to the right treatments, fulfilling the promise of precision medicine,” said Lincoln Nadauld, MD, PhD, CEO of Culmination Bio, and former Vice President and Chief of Precision Health at Intermountain Health. “With access to over 4.5 million biological samples uniquely tied to decades of clinical outcome data, Culmination Bio is in a unique position to help Cofactor in the development of its novel genomic diagnostic OncoPrism.”
“Closing the precision medicine gap in immunotherapy requires a collaborative effort from all stakeholders involved in a patient’s care plan, including test developers,” said Cofactor Genomics CEO Jarret Glasscock, PhD. “We are committed to seeing innovation move from laboratory to clinic, and are proud to be working with the forward-thinking team at Culmination Bio who have been at the forefront of leveraging their considerable data and sample assets to fuel innovation.”
About Culmination Bio
Culmination is changing the world by discovering better health. We provide unparalleled value to healthcare organizations by unlocking biological data and enriching it with clinical, claims, and genomic data. We are on a journey to radically improve everyone's future health care experience. Culmination Bio will become the trusted source for health care insights and for generating discoveries that improve people’s lives.
About Cofactor Genomics
Cofactor Genomics is bridging the precision medicine gap by building diagnostic tools to match the right patient to the right treatment at the right time. Predicting patient response to therapy currently relies on isolated, single-analyte biomarkers that have failed to deliver accurate therapy response predictions, resulting in unnecessary healthcare costs, and most harmfully, negative outcomes for patients. Cofactor uses Predictive Immune Modeling, which leverages RNA data and machine learning to combine biological signals, creating multidimensional biomarkers to deliver on the promise of precision medicine.
