Insilico Medicine, Inc and Champions Oncology, Inc

Insilico Medicine, Inc announces research collaboration with Champions Oncology, Inc

Champions TumorGrafts are a personalized approach used to guide physician treatment decisions for cancer patients. A piece of the patient's living tumor is removed during surgery or biopsy and engrafted in immune-deficient mice. After the TumorGraft grows, still closely resembling the patient's tumor, Champions Oncology tests drug treatments in the TumorGraft and measures the response. TumorGraft has demonstrated high rates of predictability using multiple therapies, including single-agent and combination, chemotherapy regimens and targeted biological drugs.

Every TumorGraft is preserved as a living sample for future patient use. These banked TumorGrafts can be re-grown and tested in the event of cancer progression or recurrence. In oncology drug development, TumorGraft models are utilized extensively by pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations to predict the clinical effectiveness of their compounds in targeted patient populations.

In the scope of this research collaboration Insilico Medicine will analyze a portion of Champions Oncology gene expression data sets from tumor grafts before and aftertreatment with chemotherapy drugs and compare the signaling pathway activation state (SPAS) changes with the SPAS changes in human patients.

Baltimore, MD, November 6, 2014 - Insilico Medicine, Inc, a Baltimore-based bioinformatics company focused on research in aging and age related diseases announced a research collaboration with the international leader in personalized medicine of cancer, Champions Oncology, Inc (OTC: CSBR).

Canada Cancer and Aging Research Laboratories

InSilico Medicine, the company focused on drug discovery for cancer and age-related diseases, announced its investment in a research collaboration with Canada Cancer and Aging Research Laboratories, Inc (CCARL). The companies will collaborate on improving decision making in clinical oncology and discovery, and personalized medicine projects in multiple sclerosis (MS).

The mechanisms and causes of multiple sclerosis (MS), an inflammatory disease on nerve cells, are not fully understood. MS commonly reveals itself between ages of 20 and 50, and results in significant decrease in life expectancy and loss of productivity. This partnership aims to advance knowledge and science dedicated to this disease and more.

"To my knowledge CCARL is the first company in Canada to engage into personalized medicine in clinical oncology with the aim to better understand the underlying age-related pathologic processes and use that knowledge for geroprotectors discovery", said Evgeny Makariev, director of aging research at Insilico Medicine, Inc.

"Dr. Olga Kovalchuk was included into Canada's 40 under 40 and 25 most influential women in the Canadian market for a very good reason. We were very impressed by the level of enthusiasm, expertise and quality of scientific research in genetics and epigenetics in her lab at the University of Lethbridge. CCARL has many innovative ideas on how to apply aging research to drug discovery and personalized medicine and accelerate human trials. They came up with a very clever trick on how to extrapolate some of the personalized medicine in oncology to multiple sclerosis. Their world-class team brings decades of experience in epigenetics, metagenomics and proteomics and approaching aging from a completely new angle which may result in practical applications within the next several years. Solving aging will require a concerted global effort and we would like to partner with one of the top research teams in Canada", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.

Brian Kennedy: "We are already treating ageing,"

"We are already treating ageing," said gerontologist Brian Kennedy at the International Symposium on Geroprotectors in Basel, Switzerland

Everyday remedies

And rapalogs are not the only game in town. The most commonly used medicine for type 2 diabetes, metformin, also seems to extend the lifespan of many small animals, including mice, by around 5 per cent.

There have been no trials of metformin as a longevity drug in people, but a recent study hinted that it might have a similar effect. The study was designed to compare metformin with another diabetes medicine, using records of 180,000 UK patients. To tease out the differences between the drugs, people who started taking them were compared with people without diabetes who had been closely matched for age and other health factors, and tracked over five years.

Surprisingly, diabetics taking metformin were not only less likely to die in that time than those on the other medicine but they were also about 15 per cent less likely to die than people without diabetes who took neither drug. "This shows we already have a drug that we can potentially use in humans," says Nir Barzilai, who heads the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Other familiar drugs might also fit the bill. Low-dose aspirin and statins are widely taken by healthy people to reduce their risk of heart disease. Both extend lifespan in animals and seem to have anti-inflammatory effects.

Inflammation is one of the proposed mechanisms behind ageing, so aspirin and statins could be effective heart drugs in part because they slow ageing, says Kennedy, who heads the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California.

The fact that common mechanisms seem to be behind the major diseases of ageing, like heart disease, stroke and dementia, is good news, as it suggests we should be able to extend our lifespan while also extending healthspan, according to many conference speakers. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine an effective longevity agent that worked without alleviating or delaying such conditions. Rapamycin, for instance, has been found to reduce the cognitive decline that accompanies ageing in animals.

Some researchers are already convinced and have started taking various combinations of drugs – including low-dose rapamycin. Blagosklonny is one such convert, and he's not alone: "I know many people at this meeting who are taking it," he said. No doctor would advise such a move, though, as rapamycin's potential for causing diabetes could well outweigh its anti-ageing effects.

Nevertheless, the fact that anti-ageing prescription drugs are being developed at all is a measure of how far the longevity field has come, says Zhavoronkov. "It's the first time pharma has embraced ageing."

Gadd 45 expression

 

The Future of Aging and Aging Disease Prevention

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/09/prweb12195460.htm

Three distinguished experts have joined InSilico Medicine, including Donald Small, MD, PhD, Kristen Fortney, PhD and Alexey Moskalev, DSc. 

InSilico Medicine proudly announces that Donald Small, MD, PhD, Kristen Fortney, PhD and Alexey Moskalev, DSc will aid the company’s mission to successful drug discovery and personalized medicine. It is clear meaningful progress is being made to battle aging from InSilico Medicine, considering the past major SAB additions.

About InSilico Medicine

InSilico Medicine was founded in early 2014 and has since developed the OncoFinder and Geroscope. It is a company dedicated to finding novel solutions towards aging and age-related diseases using advances in genomics and big data analysis. Through internal expertise and extensive collaborations with brilliant scientists, institutions, and highly credible pharmaceutical companies, InSilico Medicine seeks to revolutionize personalized science and drug discovery. More can be read about InSilico Medicine, Inc. at http://www.insilicomedicine.com.