Company successfully identified several abandoned or discontinued drugs for further testing and development in ovarian and other cancer types
Creates significant business development opportunities with meaningful long-term commercial potential with large pharmaceutical companies
PITTSBURGH, Feb. 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Predictive Oncology Inc. (NASDAQ: POAI), a leader in AI-driven drug discovery and biologics, today provided an update highlighting new successes with its drug repurposing initiative.
Using publicly available datasets on drugs that have either been abandoned or discontinued by large pharmaceutical companies, Predictive Oncology has developed a registry of promising candidates that can potentially be repurposed for additional or alternative indications.
By utilizing its proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning platform and leveraging its vast biobank of primary tumor samples and decades of drug response data, Predictive identified select drug candidates with promising mechanisms of action for further clinical testing with an initial focus on ovarian, colon and breast cancer and subsequently identified candidates with potential efficacy in treating colon and ovarian cancer.
“Early results show that by running our platform for just eight weeks, we were able to identify compounds for use in one or more tumor types,” said Dr. Arlette Uihlein, Senior Vice President of Translational Medicine and Drug Discovery and Medical Director at Predictive Oncology. “By precisely measuring only 92 combinations of laboratory experiments on patient tumor samples, the predictive model was capable of making an additional 964 confident predictions, covering a total of 79% of all possible experiments.”
“Our active learning AI platform enabled us to efficiently and confidently predict an additional 10x the number of measured experiments, eliminating at least 18 months of wet lab testing and identifying two drugs as having very promising results for use in one or more tumor types. Both of these drugs outperformed a known standard of care drug used to treat colon cancer,” Dr. Uihlein concluded.
Specific examples of currently abandoned or discontinued drugs that Predictive evaluated for potential efficacy include:
Drug A: Akt Inhibitor
Drug B: selective Aurora A Inhibitor
Drug C: selective PI3Kα Inhibitor
Drug D: HDAC1/3 Inhibitor
Drug E: VEGFR2/KDR Inhibitor
Drug F: PARP1/2 Inhibitor
Leveraging the company’s foundational proof of concept study, Predictive is also using its AI platform to identify a set of FDA-approved drugs for other cancers that show promising activity in ovarian cancer, the results of which will soon be made public.
“Encouraged by the outcome of the Magee Study and ASCO presentation, which predicted short and long-term survival of ovarian cancer patents, we made a conscious decision to proactively investigate potential candidates for drug repurposing or reuse specifically for ovarian cancer,” said Raymond Vennare, Chief Executive Officer of Predictive Oncology. “We continue to demonstrate that our high throughput screening approach using the live cell patient tumors in our biobank, coupled with our AI models, is able to identify drugs worthy of further consideration. The significance of these initial drug repurposing findings may lead to some very productive discussions with a range of potential drug development partners.”
About Predictive Oncology Predictive Oncology is on the cutting edge of the rapidly growing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to expedite early drug discovery and enable drug development for the benefit of cancer patients worldwide. The company’s scientifically validated AI platform, PEDAL, is able to predict with 92% accuracy if a tumor sample will respond to a certain drug compound, allowing for a more informed selection of drug/tumor type combinations for subsequent in-vitro testing. Together with the company’s vast biobank of more than 150,000 assay-capable heterogenous human tumor samples, Predictive Oncology offers its academic and industry partners one of the industry’s broadest AI-based drug discovery solutions, further complimented by its wholly owned CLIA laboratory facility. Predictive Oncology is headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA.
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