Predictive Oncology (NASDAQ: POAI), a knowledge-driven company focused on applying artificial intelligence (“AI”) to personalized medicine and drug discovery, today announced it has completed its acquisition of Quantitative Medicine LLC (“QM”), a biomedical analytics and computational biology company, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $1.8 million.
QM, which was cofounded by Drs. Robert Murphy and Joshua Kangas, both of Carnegie Mellon University’s Computational Biology Department, developed its novel, computational drug-discovery platform CoRETM, an innovative machine learning platform that predicts the main effects of drugs on target molecules that mediate disease, which is expected to dramatically reduce the time, cost and financial risk of discovering new therapeutic drugs.
“This acquisition will enable us to further leverage our unique database of drug-response and genomics profiles that our subsidiary, Helomics, has gathered from more than 150,000 cancer cases over more than 10 years of clinical testing,” commented Dr. Carl Schwartz, Predictive Oncology’s CEO. “Integrating QM’s proven machine learning platform, CoRE, with our proprietary database of drug response and genomics profiles is expected to revolutionize the role of our AI-driven predictive models in the discovery and development of new anti-cancers. We will be able to more quickly understand how specific types of tumors react to cancer drug therapies. This will allow our customers to accelerate the development and commercialization of personalized patient treatments that dramatically improve patient outcomes. We intend to offer this new capability to our pharmaceutical company customers in revenue generating projects this year.”
Dr. Schwartz added, “CoRE is a predictive model-building platform for drug screening and optimization campaigns that uses hybrid machine learning approaches to build predictive models rapidly and drive wet lab experimentation. Unlike the approach of many AI companies working purely “in silico,” our approach will unite the CoRE approach with our PDx tumor profiling platform and tumor data database, allowing for a one-of-a-kind, end-to-end ‘discovery machine’ that can rapidly generate potential therapeutic candidates in a cost-effective manner. Therapeutic candidates developed by this iterative AI and experiment cycle can be fast-tracked, since there will already be demonstrated activity in preclinical laboratory tests rather than just a computer model.”
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“Furthermore, the CoRE platform is disease neutral and coupled with Helomics’ CLIA laboratory offers the exciting possibility of providing a wide range of new revenue generating projects with Pharmaceutical companies, not just in cancer, but in inflammatory and metabolic disease as well as the search for new antibiotics, anti-viral and vaccines,” added Dr Mark Collins, Chief Technology Officer at Helomics.
Under the terms of the purchase agreement, Predictive Oncology issued 954,719 shares of its common stock at a valuation of $1.833 per share. Additional details regarding the transaction can be found on the company’s report filed on Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 7, 2020.
Source: Biospace