Avacta collaborates with Tempus AI to enhance cancer therapy development

Avacta Therapeutics has embarked on a strategic partnership with Tempus AI to enhance the development of oncology drugs. This collaboration grants Avacta access to Tempus' vast multimodal datasets, which include primary tumour samples and data from over 200,000 patients suffering from various types of cancer. The primary focus of this collaboration is to utilize this clinical data to study the tumour microenvironment and fibroblast activation protein (FAP) activity, which are central to Avacta’s pre|CISION technology.

The pre|CISION platform developed by Avacta is a sophisticated delivery system designed to target tumour-specific protease, thereby concentrating potent treatments within the tumour microenvironment and minimizing the impact on healthy tissues. Avacta's CEO, Christina Coughlin, emphasized the significant benefit this collaboration will bring to their oncology programmes. She highlighted that gaining a comprehensive understanding of the tumour microenvironment, FAP biology, and the expression of FAP across different solid tumour scenarios will be instrumental for their pre|CISION programmes.

This partnership with Tempus AI is expected to leverage their real-world database and advanced AI capabilities, enabling Avacta to better identify patient populations that are most likely to respond to their therapies. This, in turn, will facilitate faster and more efficient clinical development with a higher probability of success. Recently, Avacta has also expanded its platform with two new preclinical programmes: AVA6103 and AVA7100. AVA6103 is a peptide drug conjugate that employs exatecan, a topoisomerase I inhibitor, to deliver targeted anti-tumour effects. AVA7100, a first-in-class Affimer drug conjugate, is designed to target cancers with varying levels of FAP expression.

Kate Sasser, the chief scientific officer at Tempus AI, expressed enthusiasm about the collaboration, noting that Tempus was established to create one of the largest libraries of multimodal data and an operating system to make this data accessible and useful. She stated that the partnership with Avacta aligns with this vision, and they are excited to support Avacta in their mission to bring revolutionary new therapies to patients in need.

The insights gained from this collaboration are anticipated to significantly enhance the reach of Avacta’s pre|CISION platform by identifying broader patient populations for their clinical programmes. Computational biology experts from Tempus will collaborate with the Avacta team to analyze the data, potentially accelerating the development of effective cancer treatments.

In September 2024, Tempus AI also expanded its collaboration with Takeda to further advance oncology research and development. This ongoing expansion of partnerships underscores Tempus AI’s commitment to leveraging its extensive data and AI capabilities to drive innovation in the field of oncology and support the development of new and effective treatments for cancer patients.