GE Healthcare partnership targets diagnostics for better cancer treatments
New diagnostic tools will be developed by GE Healthcare and Vanderbilt University Medical Centre (VUMC) to help make cancer immunotherapies safer and more accurate.
As part of a five-year partnership, GE Healthcare and VUMC will develop multiple diagnostic tools to predict how well immunotherapy treatments will work on specific patients and if there will be any adverse effects. Since the tools will be used before therapy is administered, doctors will be able to target immunotherapies to the right patients and potentially avoid damaging and ineffective treatments.
Immunotherapies can be more effective than traditional treatments but come with severe side effects and low response rates. They work by using the immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells.
Throughout the partnership, GE Healthcare and VUMC will analyse and correlate the response of thousands of cancer patients to immunotherapy treatments, using their anonymised data. They will also develop AI-powered apps that use this data to help physicians identify the most suitable treatment for individual patients.
Alongside the app, GE Healthcare and VUMC will develop new positron-emission tomography (PET) imaging tracers to help physicians stratify cancer patients for clinical trials. Bringing new drugs to market is a long and costly process which can be hindered by the recruitment of inappropriate patients. It’s hoped that the PET tracers will be used to monitor the efficacy of immunotherapies in everyday practice.
“Immunotherapy offers tremendous promise but given the current unpredictability of some patients’ reactions to treatments, it is also associated with increased morbidity and cost. This partnership provides the opportunity to leverage strengths of both of our organisations to further personalise cancer care by creating new tools that allow clinicians to more accurately predict how patients will respond to a specific therapy,” said Jeff Balser, president and chief executive officer, Vanderbilt University Medical Centre and dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
Kieran Murphy, president and chief executive officer, GE Healthcare, said: “GE Healthcare and Vanderbilt will combine their data science, genomic, imaging and cellular analysis capabilities to help improve clinical decision making. This partnership is a great example of the increasing convergence of the tools, technologies and data used by therapy innovators and healthcare providers.”