What we do
Oncology Drug Discovery is complex. Your research model should be too.
Powering biopharma discovery and development 
What we do

Oncology Drug Discovery is complex, your research model should be too.

“The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured cancer for decades, and it simply didn’t work in humans”

Dr. Klausner, Director of the National Cancer Institute.
The failure rate of conventional models and systems must change.
Today, conventional models and systems for translating oncology drugs into clinical trials have not significantly impacted the failure rate seen in the pharmaceutical industry, with greater than 90% of novel therapeutics failing to reach the market – 50% of those due to lack of efficacy in clinical studies.

This trend has continued, until now.

Our in vivo avatars allow us to do what no other model can.
Our avatars will improve your potential to succeed in the clinic by helping you make better decisions every step of the way. We create a biological twin of each patient by replicating polygenic tumour complexity (engineering up to 20 mutations, not just one mutation) into a living, biological system.
High throughput screening in a disease-relevant, in vivo model.
  • Test thousands of drugs and combinations of drugs in over 500,000 avatars of each patient model
  • 85% of the time, patients require a minimum combination of 2 or 3 drugs to combat their cancer
  • Discover novel combinations, develop a biomarker strategy, and enable to repurposing of existing drugs
Vivan
Developed at The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, commercialised by Vivan Therapeutics
We help direct the treatment of cancer patients, enabling the rapid identification of combination therapies to treat polygenic diseases, as well as providing our Biopharma partners with patient-relevant models to test novel therapies and combinations.

 

 

01  How it works

 

 

How it works

 

High throughput screening in a disease-relevant in-vivo model.

Our in-vivo avatars allow us to do what no other model can.
We supply avatar models from our “flybrary” of patient models, and/or create models to your specifications, you supply your compounds.

Our project team works with you to define the requirements of your study through to project execution and final report. Studies using existing avatars can be completed in less than a month.

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01  As patients are recruited, tumour tissue is acquired

 

 

02  Each patient’s entire exome is analysed to capture their tumour’s network

 

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Fly
 

03  Up to 20 genetic alterations from a patient’s tumour network are engineered into a fruit fly avatar

 

 

04  Up to 2000 FDA/NICE approved drugs plus novel compounds and combinations are screened in half a million avatars

 

Fly

 

02  Potential Use Cases

 

 

Potential Use Cases

 

Vivan avatars offer a range of potential use cases:

AScreening novel molecules
for efficacy & toxicity.

BCombination analysis

Discover novel combinations. Repurpose existing molecules.

CCompetitive profiling

Compare your molecule’s efficacy with standard of cares and competitive molecules.

DPatient Stratification &
Biomarkers

Investigate response in patient avatars across a population of disease-relevant models. Relate genomic profiles to response.

EDevelop custom avatar models

Publications

Bangi E, Murgia C, Teague AG, Sansom OJ, Cagan RL. Functional exploration of colorectal cancer genomes Using Drosophila. Nat Commun. 2016;7:13615. Published 2016 Nov 29. doi:10.1038/ncomms13615

Bangi E, Ang C, Smibert P, et al. A personalized platform identifies trametinib plus zoledronate for a patient with KRAS-mutant metastatic colorectal cancer. Sci Adv. 2019;5(5):eaav6528. Published 2019 May 22. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aav6528

Get in touch to find out more