SimBioSys Awarded $2M Phase II NCI SBIR Contract
SimBioSys®, the precision medicine company behind TumorScope®, the 4D tumor modeling platform for treatment planning, announced today it has been awarded a $2M Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.
SimBioSys is a startup based at EnterpriseWorks, the incubator at the University of Illinois Research Park in Champaign.
Heterogeneity among cancers and differences within individual tumors continue to challenge the efforts to develop effective therapies and design clinical trials. Therefore, SimBioSys’ goal with PhenoScope™ is to provide a cutting-edge extension of their TumorScope platform to capture tumor heterogeneity and develop the next generation of multi-modal biomarkers to support cancer research in academia and biopharma.
“It’s an exciting time in cancer research due to the explosion of cancer phenotyping datasets, yet the computational complexity of analyzing and connecting such data across scales is hindering progress,” said Dr. Joseph Peterson, CTO of SimBioSys. “PhenoScope builds on our strong 4D tumor modeling fundamentals to further support our collaborators and researchers at earlier stages of the cancer care industry.”
PhenoScope integrates data from multiple biological scales including genomic, cellular/pathway, microscopic tissue environment, and organ scales with clinical outcomes data. This multi-scale interconnection will enable study of diverse biological characteristics that affect tumor phenotype, from mutations and response to drugs and spatial heterogeneity.
The technology combines state-of-the-art machine learning, dimensionality reduction techniques, novel spatio-temporal simulation algorithms, and supports numerous public data repositories. Platform users will have new means of assessing factors contributing to a cancer’s phenotypical behavior, thereby allowing elucidation of new pharmacodynamic, prognostic, predictive, and surrogate biomarkers.
“It’s fascinating how PhenoScope connects complex cancer datasets and allows the visualization of such data in a 4D manner,” said Tricia Carrigan, SVP of precision medicine at SimBioSys. “We now have a tool that enables us to determine drug dosing and biomarker relationships more precisely before ever dosing a patient, which will play an important role in drug development.”
The company successfully completed a Phase I contract in 2021 centered around the development of the prototype cloud- and web-based version of PhenoScope. During the Phase II contract, SimBioSys will expand access to PhenoScope and novel datasets to a broader user base.