Dr. Richard Stratford and Trevor Clancy in OncoImmunity are happy about getting prestigious financing through EUs SME Instrument in December 2018. Photo: Oslo Cancer Cluster

Machine-learning for immunotherapy

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Photo of Richard Stratford and Trevor Clancy in OncoImmunity.

A prestigious EU-grant will advance OncoImmunity’s machine-learning approach to develop personalized cancer immunotherapy.

The bioinformatics company OncoImmunity AS is empowering cancer immunotherapy with artificial intelligence. They use innovative software solutions to guide the discovery of neoantigen-based personalized immunotherapies and biomarkers. What does this really mean?

It means that the software they have developed helps to identify neoantigens, also known as immunogenic mutations, in a patient’s cancer cells. Cancer cells deceive the immune system by looking like healthy cells. But they still express cancer-specific markers, known as neoantigens. (See facts box for explanation.)

Enables personalized medicine
The interesting part about neoanitgens, is that every patient’s tumor expresses a unique combination. This enables truly personalized medicine to be applied, if the correct neoantigens are selected from the thousands of possible candidates in the genome of a tumor. Researchers using this technology can now solve this “needle in the haystack” challenge by analyzing a tumor genome to figure out the right cocktail of neoantigens, for each individual patient, and design a specific vaccine or cell therapy uniquely designed just for them.

Such personalzed immunotherapy can for instance boost the immune system’s response by making the immune system better able to recognize and target the patient’s unique cancer cells.

Faster bespoke treatment
OncoImmunity’s flagship software, the ImmuneProfiler™,is a unique machine learning solution that makes it easier to instantaneously see and accurately select which neoantigens will be responsive in each patient.

It thereby helps biotech companies design neoantigen-based personalized cancer vaccines and cell therapies and enables bespoke treatments to be developed faster. Additionally, the technology allows clinical researchers to select which patients will likely respond to the wide range of cancer immunotherapies currently under development in the field.

In that sense, the OncoImmunity-approach to cancer treatment is exactly in line with Oslo Cancer Cluster’s main goal: to speed up the development of new cancer treatments for the benefit of cancer patients.

Prestigious EU-grant
Horizon 2020’s SME Instrument is a grant that is tailored for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). It targets innovative businesses with international ambitions — such as OncoImmunity.

The SME Instrument has two application phases. Phase one awards the winning company 50 000 Euros based on an innovative project idea. Phase two is the actual implementation of the main project. In this phase, the applicant may receive between 1 and 2,5 million Euros.

Oncoimmunity won the phase one project last year. Then, the founders of the bioinformatics company were happy about the opportunity to refine and optimize their machine-learning framework. Their goal has always been to facilitate personalized cancer vaccine design.

Fantastic funding
Now, they have won a considerably larger grant of 2,2 Million Euros that they are going to use to fund a project titled Machine-learning Engine for the Design of personalized Vaccines in Cancer (MEDIVAC).

The SME Instrument grant provides OncoImmunity the opportunity to further customise their machine-learning framework, called the ImmuneProfiler™,for specific vaccine platforms, facilitating the design of safer and more efficacious personalised cancer vaccines.

— We applied for the SME instrument grant as it represents a fantastic funding vehicle for cutting edge, innovative projects with huge commercial potential. The call matched our ambition to position OncoImmunity as the leading supplier of neoantigen identification software in the personalised cancer vaccine market, says Dr. Richard Stratford, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of OncoImmunity.

— This opportunity will also help us establish the requisite quality assurance systems, certifications, and clinical validation with our partners, to get our software approved as a medical device in both the EU and US, says Dr. Trevor Clancy, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-founder of OncoImmunity.

SMEs can apply
The SME Instrument is looking for high growth- and highly innovative SMEs with global ambitions. They are developing innovative technologies that have the potential to disrupt the established value networks and existing markets.

Companies applying for the SME Instrument must meet the requirements set by the programme. Please see the SME Instrument website for more information in English or the SME Instrument webpage of Innovation Norway for more information in Norwegian.

Curious about which companies have received the SME Instrument so far? Have look at this database with an overview of all the grant receiving companies in Europe.

Want to know which Norwegian companies received grants from The European Unions research programme Horizon2020 in 2018? Read this article from Innovation Norway (in Norwegian).

Oslo Cancer Cluster  supports members via the EU Advisor Program in collaboration with Innovayt, making them aware of relevant EU- and H2020 funding opportunities and helping them to identify the right calls for their development phase and goals. Oslo Cancer Cluster also assists with partner searches using national and international networks and provides direct support during the grant writing and submission process.

 

Professor Johanna Olweus from the Institute for Cancer Research at Oslo University Hospital speaks to a full auditorium at Oslo Cancer Cluster Innovation Park 5 December 2018. 

Days to partner up

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Roche is looking for new partners in the innovative Norwegian life science scene. 

Roche is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world with about 800 ongoing clinical trials. Within cancer research and development, this translates into about 500 clinical trials for many different types of cancer. Roche is a member in Oslo Cancer Cluster. 

Read more about Roche’s cancer research

As a part of Roche’s scouting for new innovative collaborations, the company arranged two partnering days in the beginning of December together with Oslo Cancer Cluster and the health cluster Norway Health Tech. Together, we welcomed start-ups, biotechs, academic researchers, clinicians, politicians, innovation agencies, students and other interested parties to a two day open meeting.

Partnering with companies 
The first day was at the at Oslo Cancer Cluster Innovation Park and the second day was at Oslo Science Park.

Growing life sciences in Norway is important to Oslo Cancer Cluster, and the larger pharmaceutical companies’ commitment to working with local stakeholders and local companies is an essential part of the innovative developments in this field.

Such collaborations have the potential to bring more investment to Norway and provide platforms for local companies to innovate, thrive and grow. 

— What we want to do is to strengthen the collaborations and to see even more companies emerge from the exciting research going on in academia in Norway, said Jutta Heix, Head of International Affairs at Oslo Cancer Cluster. 

Partnering with academia
Professor Johanna Olweus from the Institute for Cancer Research at Oslo University Hospital was one of the speakers. She also presented the Department of Immunology and K.G. Jebsen Center for Cancer Immunotherapy for a full auditorium at Oslo Cancer Cluster Innovation Park. 

Established back in 1954, the Institute for Cancer Research at Oslo University Hospital is certainly a well established institute and their Department of Immunology is currently involved in all the clinical trial phases.

— The scientists at the institute realise the importance of collaborating with the industry in order to get results out to the patients, Olweus said, and showed some examples of scientist-led innovations from the institute, including the Department of Cancer Immunology.  

In this story, you can read more about how science from Oslo University Hospital is turning into innovation that truly helps cancer patients.

Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg hosted the latest Northern Future Forum 30 October 2018. During the forum, the Prime Ministers of the Nordic and the Baltic countries and the UK came together in Oslo Cancer Cluster Innovation Park to discuss health technologies and the role these crucial technologies can play in the health systems of the future. In this picture, the ministers get a guided tour of Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator and the laboratories with Ketil Widerberg as their guide. Photo: Kilian Munch/Statsministerens kontor

Let us cooperate on precise health technologies

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International cooperation is key to fulfilling our vision of making cancer treatments more precise, and giving the patients new treatments more quickly.

This opinion piece is written by Ketil Widerberg, General Manager at Oslo Cancer Cluster. It was first published in the Norwegian newspaper Today’s Medicine, Dagens Medisin, 30 October 2018. 

The countries in Northern Europe have contributed to developing medical treatments that we today could not imagine living without. From the British discovery of antibiotics to the Danish development of a treatment for diabetes. Once again it is time for Northern European health innovation, this time in the field of health technology. What might the prime ministers from Northern Europe focus on when they meet in Oslo on 30 October to discuss health technology?

They might want to point out concrete and state-of-the-art initiatives from their respective countries. It could be Swedish biobanks, Finnish artificial intelligence, Danish health data, English genomics and Estonian health blockchain. These are exciting initiatives that make medicine more precise. This is particularly important when it comes to cancer because more precise treatments could save lives and limit the late effects resulting from imprecise treatment.

This opinion piece is written by Ketil Widerberg, General Manager at Oslo Cancer Cluster. It was first published in the Norwegian newspaper Today’s Medicine, Dagens Medisin, 30 October 2018.

At the same time, we see the contours of serious challenges arising with more precise medicine, such as each unit becoming more expensive. Smaller patient groups also mean that it is harder to find enough patients to understand the biological processes and the consequences of new medical treatments. As the prime ministers gather in Oslo to discuss health technology and plan the road ahead, it would not be amiss for them to look back in time and find inspiration from another technological development.

Precise through cooperation
In the 1990s, the search engine Yahoo helped us to quality-assure by categorising and being precise when we needed information on the internet. Yahoo thus contributed to the internet changing the world. However, the amount of data soon became enormous and complex, and a never-ending need for resources and experts arose. The traditional categorisation to ensure quality and structure the data became an impossible task.

This is very similar to what is happening in the health field today. We are constantly collecting more data and educating an increasing number of experts. With a few exceptions, every country is now collecting their data in their own registers and using a great deal of resources on assuring the quality of the data. The countries are rightfully proud of their initiatives. In Norway, we are proud of our biobanks and our health registers, such as the Cancer Registry of Norway. At the same time, we need to ask ourselves whether this national strategy really is the smartest way forward.

Let us go back to Yahoo. Towards the end of the 1990s, some engineers in California thought differently about the internet. How about using cooperation as a quality indicator? Instead of categorising, the links between the websites could ensure data quality. This is how Google was born, and we got precision, quality and insight into data that changed the world.

There are different challenges in the health field than on the internet. Data are more sensitive and the consequences for individuals can often be more dire. At the same time, health technology, in many ways, has reached the same point as the internet faced in the 1990s.  We do not have the quantity, the methods for analysis, or the quality to fully exploit the data to gather insight, or for treatment or innovation – yet.

From Yahoo to Google level
One way in which we could tackle the health technology challenges the data present us with is through international cooperation. It is about two things: to gather enough data, and to analyse the data to provide better and more precise treatment. The initiatives so far are promising, but they lack the potential to make the leap from Yahoo to Google.

The Northern European prime ministers can probably acknowledge this. The question is: what can they do? Should they encourage smart young engineers to analyse health data instead of developing the next app? Or should they change the way the hospitals buy technology?

A step in the right direction could be to look at what works best in the other countries. At the same time, we need to avoid new initiatives merely becoming a better horse-drawn carriage. Are there initiatives in existence that are scalable internationally so that we can bring health data up to the next level together? The answer is yes, but it requires visionary initiatives that have not been done anywhere else.

Common clinical studies
An area that the prime ministers will be able to highlight is a Northern European initiative for clinical studies. Together, the countries have a large number of patients, which gives researchers and doctors a better basis in their studies to understand more and provide better treatment. Such an initiative could also use health data from the national health services collected on a daily basis in several countries, known as real world data, instead of eventual clinical studies with patients over several years. This would be both quicker and much cheaper.

The prime ministers might also agree on cooperating on Northern European genetics. For 13 years, we collaborated on mapping our genes in the international  Human Genome Project. Now we need to get together to understand genes and treat the patients. With prioritised funding, genetics will soon be a part of the everyday clinical life in England. We can learn a lot from their experience.

Artificial intelligence
Lastly, the Northern European prime ministers may wish to collaborate on artificial intelligence in the health field. Today, cancer treatment, for instance, often only works on three out of ten patients. Artificial intelligence will change how we understand diseases such as cancer and how we treat the patients. The experiences from Finland of introducing artificial intelligence will help other countries to understand where the barriers are and where help might be needed first.

Oslo Cancer Cluster’s vision is to make cancer treatment more precise and provide new treatments more quickly to the patients. We see that international cooperation is key to obtaining this goal. As a result, we could also discover diseases more quickly and reduce the costs of the national health services. We hope the Northern European prime ministers will delve into these issues when they meet to discuss the health technologies of the future here with us.

By Ketil Widerberg, General Manager at Oslo Cancer Cluster.

The Vaccibody Team at Oslo Science Park. Photo: Vaccibody

Prestigious partnership for Vaccibody

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Oslo Cancer Cluster member Vaccibody is entering into a clinical collaboration with the American biopharmaceutical company Nektar Therapeutics.

The aim of the collaboration is to explore positive effects from the combination of Vaccibody’s personalized cancer vaccine VB10.NEO and Nektar Therapeutics cancer drug NKTR-214. Pre-clinical results of the combination are very positive and the collaboration will mark the start of a clinical trial stage.

The clinical trials will include patients with head and neck cancer and initially involve 10 patients.

What is Nektar?
Nektar Therapeutics is not just any company when it comes to immunotherapy. At Nasdaq their market value is set as high as 10 billion dollars.

– For a year now, Nektar might be the most talked about company within immunotherapy and this winter they landed the largest deal of its kind with Bristol Meyers-Squibb (BMS), says Agnete Fredriksen, President and Chief Scientific Officer, in an interview with Norwegian newspaper Finansavisen.

Help more patients
BMS and Nektar started collaborating on the development of the immunotherapy drug NKTR-214, the same drug that is part of the collaboration with Vaccibody, with a potential worth of 3.6 billion dollars.

– That they want to work with us is a nice validation of Vaccibody and makes us able to help even more cancer patients. We hope the combination of our products will lead to even better treatments, Agnete Fredriksen says to Finansavisen.

More about Vaccibody’s cancer vaccine

Nektar and Vaccibody each will maintain ownership of their own compounds in the clinical collaboration, and the two companies will jointly own clinical data that relate to the combination of their respective technologies. Under the terms of the agreement and following the completion of the pilot study, the two companies will evaluate if they will take the partnership to the next stage.