Repositive has announced Vivan Therapeutics will be the next company to join its global network of cancer model partners. Vivan is a personalised therapeutics company with experience in engineering drosophila ‘avatar’ models for cancer research and development.
Its proprietary technology enables it to engineer the genetic complexity of a cancer patient's 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 platform can be used to screen novel molecules for efficacy and toxicity, discover combinations, develop a biomarker strategy, and enable the repurposing of existing drugs. With this 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 called the Cancer Models Scout, 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 report of all identified matching models within 2-4 weeks of submitting a query, the company says.
"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.
