Unmet Need: 

  • Cancer remains a major global health challenge, with approximately 20 million new cases diagnosed annually worldwide.
  • Despite the availability of multiple treatment options, many patients undergo prolonged, painful, and expensive therapies that are not always effective.
  • Current precision oncology approaches mainly rely on known driver mutations or gene expression profiles, which limits their applicability to a small subset of patients.
  • As a result, only about 2–5% of cancer patients benefit from existing companion diagnostic solutions, leaving the majority without actionable guidance.
  • There is a significant unmet need for technologies that can better match patients to effective drugs, while also informing optimal dosing and rational drug combinations to improve outcomes and reduce unnecessary toxicity.

Our Innovation

  • We developed a computational precision oncology framework that identifies tumor-specific drug vulnerabilities based on novel type of synthetic lethality targets.
  • During tumor development, cancers accumulate millions of random mutations, including numerous mutations that can compromise tumor survival under specific drug exposure.
  • Each tumor harbors a unique genomic mut profile, often consisting of dozens to hundreds of inactivated genes, many of which are not currently exploited clinically.
  • By systematically analyzing hundreds of millions interactions, large genomic, clinical, and pharmacological datasets, our platform identifies novel associations between common genetic signatures, that increase sensitivity to specific drugs.
  • These identified cancer vulnerabilities form the basis for Vulnerability Companion Diagnostics (vCDX), which can guide drug selection, dose reduction, and optimized drug combinations.
  • The approach enables a patient-specific treatment strategy, leveraging existing drugs and combinations tailored to the tumor’s genomic vulnerability landscape.

Advantages

  • Vulnerability genetic landscape-focused analysis, rather than single-gene markers or expression profiles
  • Identification of novel CDXs, not limited to already-known biomarkers
  • Broader patient coverage, with potential relevance to >30% of patients
  • Supports optimized drug dosing, potentially reducing toxicity
  • Enables novel drug combinations, tailored to tumor-specific vulnerabilities
  • Applicable to existing approved drugs, supporting expanded indications

Commercial Opportunity

We are seeking collaboration with pharmaceutical, biotech, diagnostics, and healthcare companies to develop and validate vCDX-based precision oncology solutions, in order to improve patient stratification, treatment efficacy, and drug utilization.

Contact in Yissum: Ariela Markel