Institut Curie, Euformatics, Oncompass Medicine awarded Eurostars funding to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment

Eurostars[1] is a joint program with 37 participating countries that is created to promote European R&D collaboration between innovative growth companies. This program is developed by EUREKA[2] and the European Commission as part of the European Partnership on Innovative SMEs.

Current genomic analyses show a significant problem when it comes to detecting tumor variants from low quality sequencing data. In a real world setting, there are often artifacts and other noise in the data. As a result, tumor variants with low allele frequencies can be missed by the clinical geneticist analyzing the sample. Thus, these low-frequency mutations of medical importance remain undiscovered, affecting clinical cancer diagnosis and therapy.

To satisfy this unmet need and improve the care and survival of cancer patients, Euformatics, Oncompass Medicine and Institut Curie have teamed up to develop a precision oncology platform that cancel out genomic noise. Thanks to this funding, the three partners will join forces to meet this challenge in a 2.5-year project with a ~1-million-euro budget.

Euformatics and Oncompass Medicine, two cutting edge companies specializing in clinical diagnostic software, will build on their existing products to deliver a disruptive interpretation solution that will be validated using the rich and extensive real-world oncology data from Institut Curie, a world-leading cancer research organisation.

The Eurostars funding award will be key to test and optimize the clinical performance of this envisioned solution for precision oncology, designed to improve diagnosis and patient care.

explains Dr. Maud Kamal, scientific manager of the Department of Drug Development & Innovation (D3i) at Institut Curie.

Dr. Christophe Roos, Chief Scientific Officer of Euformatics, comments on the Eurostars funding:

This funding award was a result of several iterations during the past few years. Finding a challenge in this field that is both solvable in a relatively short time window but still advancing the state of the art in molecular pathology was not easy. Fortunately, we have the best possible partners in this project with Oncompass and Institut Curie.

Dr. Barbara Vodicska, Head of Translational Science, Oncompass Medicine, continues:

The integrity of input data is a fundamental pillar for the effectiveness of decision support systems, profoundly influencing the quality of the output. We are enthusiastic about collaboratively establishing an optimized workflow to standardize and democratize precision oncology, spanning from raw data to therapy selection. With the inclusion of bioinformatics, clinical, and reporting expertise, we have everything needed for a successful project.

The project will start in the next few months and run until 2026. At the end of the project, the consortium will seek IVDR (In-Vitrodiagnostic Regulation) certification for the oncology solution to be used in clinical diagnostics in addition to cancer research.

[1] Consortiums may submit applications to the Eurostars program from any subject area. There are two cut-off dates annually, and all the applications submitted before each deadline are processed in one batch.

[2] EUREKA is a European program that supports innovative international projects to boost Europe's competitiveness.