New personalised therapeutics partner joins Repositive Cancer Model network

Cambridge UK - 2^nd March 2021 – Life Science Newswire - Repositive has announced today that Vivan Therapeutics will be the next company to join its global network of cancer model partners. Based in London, Vivan Therapeutics is an innovative personalised therapeutics company with unique experience in engineering drosophila ‘avatar’ models for cancer research and development. Their proprietary technology enables them to engineer the genetic complexity of a cancer patient's unique tumour network (up to 20 mutations or alterations) into an army of 500,000 fruit flies, which can then be screened for responses to up to 2,000 FDA approved drugs (including non-cancer drugs) and investigational drugs, to identify drug combinations that are efficacious in the individual's personalised fly population. The Vivan Therapeutics platform can be used to screen novel molecules for efficacy and toxicity, discover novel combinations, develop a biomarker strategy, and enable the repurposing of existing drugs. With this new partnership, Repositive is expanding its personalised medicine capabilities to support more biopharma customers in their oncology drug development programmes.

Repositive’s core offering is a specialist and confidential concierge service available as a subscription package, namely the Cancer Models Scout (CMS), which provides tailored model recommendations to cancer researchers based on a search across Repositive’s extended global network of up to 20,000 preclinical models. Customers receive a data-rich report of all identified matching models within 2-4 weeks of submitting a query, which helps to significantly speed up the sourcing of cancer models for preclinical oncology studies. Repositive has a growing track record of saving researchers months to years by connecting them to the right cancer models in a much faster timeframe.

“Vivan Therapeutics offers something different to our customers that we haven’t had in our model network before. With cancer research becoming more and more focused around personalised medicine, we know it is important to keep expanding our offering in this area and partnering with Vivan is allowing us to do so” said Catherine McDermott, CEO of Repositive.

“Our avatars allow us to do what no other model can - replicate polygenic tumour complexity in a living, biological system for high throughput drug screening. Our library of personalised
Drosophila models is ever expanding, and we can also create custom models for biopharma clients. We are excited to become part of the Repositive network to provide our cancer models and services to the global academic and commercial development community.” said Laura Towart, CEO of Vivan Therapeutics.

Repositive also provide unlimited access to their Cancer Models Platform as part of a subscription to their CMS service, which displays curated metadata from over 8,000 preclinical cancer models, made available for biopharma researchers to browse anytime, anywhere. The platform provides the option of filtering content by primary site, model type, subtype, gene mutation, variant, treatment and treatment response, and metadata is standardised across all models to make them easily comparable. This helps to lessen the workload for researchers and in-house bioinformatics teams supporting in vivo oncology researchers by providing an easy-access interface through which additional model queries can be performed.

About Repositive

Repositive operates with the ultimate goal of helping to accelerate cancer drug development and bring treatments and cures to patients more quickly. They partner with contract research organisations (CROs) worldwide to provide a bespoke model search concierge service, the Cancer Model Scout, to support researchers working in oncology to find the right cancer models for their studies. They also organise and curate cancer model data from partner CROs, and present this inventory of models online, via their Cancer Models Platform. Repositive’s main mission is to help preclinical oncology researchers speed up their projects and increase translational success by enabling them to find and source the most suitable cancer models for their needs.

About Vivan Therapeutics

Vivan Therapeutics offers personalised cancer therapeutics utilising technology developed at and in partnership with Mt Sinai Medical Center. We identify personalised cancer treatments for patients based on their tumour genetics. For each patient, we build a genetically matched fruit fly model of the tumour, which is used for large-scale drug screening to find novel and effective drug combinations. This platform can treat even difficult cancers with combinations of approved drugs. Using our proprietary screening data, we are building a powerful AI-driven digital health tool, which can predict effective treatment options rapidly. Our in vivo, high throughput drug screening platform is also used to power biopharma discovery and development.