Precise Diagnosis Better Treatments
Providing Precision Medicine Solutions for Cancer through Biology-Guided Diagnostics
PROVIDING PRECISION MEDICINE SOLUTIONS IN CANCER THROUGH BIOLOGY GUIDED DIAGNOSTICS.
The Current Approach to Cancer Treatment
The current approach to cancer treatment can be best described as one-size-fits-all. But the fact is, one size does not fit all and cancer drugs don’t work the same way for everyone. A report published by Personalized Medicine Coalition in 2017, pointed out that any particular class of cancer drugs is ineffective in a startling 75% of patients!
Due to the one-size-fits-all approach, a large number of cancer patients fail to respond to their prescribed treatments and experience serious negative side effects, causing a big impact on society and the economy. In the United States alone, the economic burden due to adverse drug reactions is more than 30 billion dollars annually.
In today’s era of targeted therapy, it is essential to identify patient subsets that are either likely or unlikely to respond to a particular drug. Doing so would maximize the efficacy and minimize unnecessary toxicity associated with the use of the drug in question.
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Precision Medicine – The Way Forward, But Cancer Heterogeneity a Major Bottleneck
This is where Precision Medicine comes in. Precision Medicine is an emerging approach to medical treatment that allows doctors to select treatment regimes that are most likely to help patients based on the genetic understanding of their disease.
For cancer therapy, however, there are significant challenges in applying personalised and precision medicine approaches. Cancer is a genetically heterogeneous disease, with a large number of genetic alterations present within a patient’s cancerous growth (typically, a single tumour contains anywhere from tens to millions of genomic aberrations). This represents a major impediment to designing effective personalised treatment strategies against cancer.
Stratifying patients by mutation status, for e.g., PIK3Ca mutation, has resulted in improvement in response rates in the clinical trials testing inhibitors to PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway. Non-responders to treatment, though, are still common. Given the highly heterogeneous and chaotic landscape in cancer biology, the isolated molecular entities have little/no value on their own for precision medicine purposes.
To address the problem of heterogeneity in precision cancer diagnosis and treatment, one promising solution is to optimise the process through molecular sub-typing based on the intrinsic biology of cancer. The current application of molecular classifiers is still restricted to the prediction of cancer recurrence risk. What is needed are classification systems that can be correlated with the outcomes of various specific treatment regimes.
Image credit: Prostate Cancer Foundation
Who We Are
Founded by Amit Gupta, PhD, Akrivia is at heart an innovation maker with a focus on precision medicine in cancer treatment. Akrivia, taken from the Greek word for precision, the name itself signifies our dedication to the exactness of science.
Our founder has deep expertise in the field of translational cancer science and has been the lead in several significant research projects at multiple research institutes of repute, the Institute of Cancer Research, London, among them.
Our Vision
At Akrivia, our vision is to help bring solutions to market that drive cancer treatment strategies from the current one-size-fits-all approach to the precision medicine approach in its truest sense. We aim to be a force in tailored therapeutics where we are able to say more clearly to patients, payers, and providers – ‘this drug is not for everyone, but it is for you'.
One of our main goals is to put in place the next generation of classification systems to stratify cancer patients into treatment regimes. This is to be done based on a novel and innovative methodology developed by Akrvia’s founder, reflecting the intrinsic biology of the disease. This approach to classifying tumours based on specific disease biology would undoubtedly be more clinically relevant and lead the way to novel paradigms for stratified medicine and tailored therapies.
By doing so, we would be able to create a formal treatment structure that works better than the non-structured approaches currently in use. We also aim to develop effective treatment strategies against cancer based on the identified rational biomarkers.
With this end in mind, we have identified the next-generation classifier systems for breast cancer, endometrial cancer and prostate cancer. Our innovative proprietary molecular sub-typing systems provide precise details on specific disease biology by considering each patient tumour's unique genomic and immune makeup.
Careful consideration of each tumour’s genomic and immune landscape equips us to predict the accurate prognosis and best clinical and therapeutic approach for these patients. Our ultimate goal is to develop these innovative, ground-breaking classifier systems for clinical practice. Currently, no tests can predict the treatment response and guide the selection of the most appropriate therapies for individual patients in these cancer types; existing first and second-generation prognostic diagnostic tests available in the market do not provide any biologically relevant information. Also, most of these existing genomic tools for cancer prognostication are often associated with the same tumour characteristics interrogated by the standard clinicopathological parameters, namely, hormonal status or proliferation, thereby failing to capture the full complexity of tumoural heterogeneity. Whereas the ‘single-gene biomarker’-based precision medicine diagnostic tests focuses on single genetic alterations/mutations without understanding their nuance, context and significance in a tumour’s genomically complex landscape. This is where the Akrivia approach scores over existing techniques.
Key Benefits of Precision Healthcare
As the cost of drug therapy grows, timely diagnosis and correct treatment could help to reduce a major percentage of the national healthcare bill. This will not only result in financial savings but also lead to existing drug-based therapies becoming safer and more effective.
Akrivia’s vision to apply precision treatments for cancer will allow doctors to improve significantly upon present treatment regimes.
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Image credit: Shutterstock
The Market Potential
Due to advancements in the field of precision medicine and the high success rates the treatment methodology has shown, it is expected that the market for Precision Medicines is only going to expand. In fact, the Precision Medicine market is already a multi-billion-dollar industry and is expected to grow to the tune of over $216.75 billion by 2028.
This makes it one of the fastest-growing markets in the present economy, which has certainly seen an increase in the number of individuals choosing to opt for personalized treatment. Along with that, high incidences of cancer (according to the report of WHO, the global cancer burden has increased to 18.1 million new cases and 9.6 million deaths in 2018), together with technological advancements such as next-generation sequencing, have fuelled interest in this already flourishing field. So much so that the government and policymakers have also come forward to support this industry’s initiatives.
In particular, the cancer biomarker market is projected to reach about USD 28 billion by the end of 2025, driven by rapid growth in genomic analysis and increasing diagnostic applications of biomarkers in oncology.
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Be A Part of Akrivia
At the early steps of our journey, we are confident to drive cancer diagnostics and therapeutics through our breakthrough research and innovative approach.
To accomplish this, we invite you to join our journey to success by partnering, collaborating and investing in our venture.
So come, be a part of the Akrivia journey. Together, we can make a better tomorrow.
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References
1. Personalized Medicine Coalition. The personalized medicine Report. Opportunity, challenges, and the future (2017)
2. Sultana J et al. Clinical and economic burden of adverse drug reactions. J Pharmacol Pharmacother. 2013, 4:S73-S77.
3. Gary Kurtzman. A Business Model for Diagnostic Startups-A Business Model for a New Generation of Diagnostics Companies. Biotechnol Healthc. 2005, 2:50-55.
4. BIS Research. Global Precision Medicine Market: Focus on Precision Medicine Ecosystem, Applications, 13 Countries Mapping, and Competitive Landscape - Analysis and Forecast, 2018-2028.
5. Kenneth Research. Cancer Biomarkers Market Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast to 2025.
6. Drier Y and Domany E. Do Two Machine-Learning Based Prognostic Signatures for Breast Cancer Capture the Same Biological Processes? 2011, 6: e17795.