PHARMA TECH
Specifica | June 03, 2022
Specifica, a privately held antibody engineering company focused on innovative in vitro antibody libraries and discovery tools, announced an agreement with the global healthcare company Sanofi under which Specifica’s patented Generation 3 Antibody Discovery Platform will be transferred to Sanofi. The comprehensive technology transfer package will enable the integration of Specifica’s Gen 3 platform into Sanofi’s antibody discovery programs.
“We are absolutely delighted to partner with Sanofi and their cutting-edge antibody discovery teams by providing our complete antibody discovery platform through a combination of Gen 3 libraries, antibody optimization solutions, and integrated discovery tools. We look forward to the realization of our collaboration with Sanofi as they continue to pursue the development of life-changing treatments.”
Ken Sharples, CEO and co-founder of Specifica
Specifica’s Gen 3 libraries combine clinically validated antibody frameworks with compatible binding loop sequences (CDRs) from natural human antibodies that have been purged of sequence-based developability liabilities. The Gen 3 discovery platform consistently yields a broad diversity of specific and developable antibodies with very high affinities, thereby avoiding downstream hit-to-lead optimization bottlenecks such as affinity maturation and developability optimization.
About Specifica
Specifica is a rapidly growing antibody engineering company specializing in the creation of exceptional antibody libraries, using next-generation sequencing for quality control at all steps of construction and validation. Specifica’s patented Generation 3 Antibody Library Discovery Platform yields drug-like antibodies directly from selections, minimizing the need for downstream affinity and biophysical engineering. Specifica provides its partners with exclusive libraries, each created from a unique donor diversity set not used for any other library, ensuring that each Gen 3 library is one of a kind. Specifica offers antibody library platforms in Fab, scFv and VHH formats. In addition to in-house antibody library designs, Specifica also collaborates closely with partners to create custom libraries in which essential elements are optimized according to partner needs. The power of the Generation 3 Platform may be accessed by engaging Specifica to execute antibody discovery and optimization campaigns, or by full transfer of the platform technology. Additionally, Specifica recently introduced AbXtractTM, a powerful suite of antibody informatics tools, through its software partner OpenEye. Specifica is headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico
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BUSINESS INSIGHTS
Replica Analytics | June 30, 2022
Critical Path Institute and Replica Analytics, an Aetion company, announced a new partnership that involves leveraging synthetic data to further catalyze the generation of actionable solutions to accelerate drug development for rare diseases.
Replica Analytics will help generate synthetic datasets across rare and orphan indications in which patient-level datasets are often quite small, which heightens considerations regarding data privacy and accessibility.
Together with real data, these synthetic data will help maximize the utility of C-Path's Rare Disease Cures Accelerator-Data and Analytics Platform which provides a centralized and standardized infrastructure to support and accelerate rare disease characterization targeted to accelerate drug development. Additionally, the platform includes a framework that supports the rigorous conduct of natural history studies, with attention to established data quality standards, to be most useful to clinical trial design and regulatory review. It includes a robust, integrated database and analytics hub that allows for the aggregation of rare disease data from various sources and the efficient and effective interrogation of that data. Once added to RDCA-DAP, the synthetic data will also represent valuable real-world, electronic health record (EHR) based data available on the platform, opening doors to modeling and research based on longitudinal focused analyses.
"Our collaboration with Replica Analytics is important because synthetic data can add value to real-world data while observing data privacy considerations, which will help accelerate overall rare disease drug development. The goal of RDCA-DAP is to provide a centralized and standardized infrastructure to support and accelerate rare disease characterization and therapy development, this collaboration is in line with our efforts."
RDCA-DAP Scientific Director Alexandre Betourne, Pharm.D., Ph.D
Synthetic data generation is a privacy enhancing technology that has been gaining rapid adoption, particularly in the life sciences sector. SDG uses AI to create machine learning models that learn the statistical patterns and properties of real datasets to generate data that retain the same characteristics as the original dataset, but with no one-to-one mapping back to an identifiable person. SDG can help amplify small datasets, simulate virtual patients to augment patients in existing datasets, and optimize the design of small sample clinical trials.
"We are certainly seeing a growing opportunity to partner with organizations like C-Path for generating datasets that are fit-for-purpose," says Khaled El Emam, Ph.D., SVP and GM of Replica Analytics. "Synthetic data, which preserves the integrity and utility of source data, as well as being privacy-protective, can be a very valuable tool to enable this collaboration."
In May 2022, C-Path hosted a webinar in which the Replica Analytics team introduced SDG and discussed the role the technology can play in researching and treating rare diseases. The event was recorded and can be viewed on C-Path's YouTube channel.
About C-Path
Critical Path Institute is an independent, non-profit organization established in 2005 as a public and private partnership. C-Path's mission is to catalyze the development of new approaches that advance medical innovation and regulatory science, accelerating the path to a healthier world. An international leader in forming collaborations, C-Path has established numerous global consortia that currently include more than 1,600 scientists from government and regulatory agencies, academia, patient organizations, disease foundations, and hundreds of pharmaceutical and biotech companies. C-Path U.S. is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, C-Path in Europe is headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands and C-Path Ltd. operates from Dublin, Ireland with additional staff in multiple other locations.
Critical Path Institute is supported by the Food and Drug Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and is 54.2% funded by the FDA/HHS, totaling $13,239,950, and 45.8% funded by non-government sources, totaling $11,196,634. The contents are those by the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, FDA/HHS or the U.S. Government.
About Replica Analytics, an Aetion company
Replica Analytics is the premier science-based SDG technology provider to the healthcare industry. The company a pioneer in the development of unique technologies for generating privacy-protective synthetic data that maintain the statistical properties of real-world data. The company was acquired in late 2021 by Aetion, the leading regulatory-grade real-world evidence technology provider. Replica Synthesis software provides a full suite of synthetic data generation and evaluation capabilities that can solve multiple grand challenges facing the life sciences industry, and health research in general.
About Aetion
Aetion is a healthcare analytics company that delivers real-world evidence for the manufacturers, purchasers, and regulators of medical treatments and technologies. The Aetion Evidence Platform® analyzes data from the real world to produce transparent, rapid, and scientifically validated answers on safety, effectiveness, and value. Founded by Harvard Medical School faculty members with decades of experience in epidemiology and health outcomes research, Aetion informs healthcare's most critical decisions—what works best, for whom, and when—to guide product development, commercialization, and payment innovation.
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BUSINESS INSIGHTS
Labcorp® | June 23, 2022
Labcorp® a leading global life sciences company, announced a new collaboration with HealthVerity, Inc., the leader in Identity, Privacy, Governance, and Exchange (IPGE) for real-world data that will expand Labcorp’s comprehensive, end-to-end drug development and clinical trial programs.
HealthVerity’s IPGE platform, an integrated technology and RWD infrastructure, enables Labcorp Drug Development and other participating companies to access fully interoperable, HIPAA-compliant data from the U.S.’s largest ecosystem1 of health care and consumer data.
“This collaboration allows Labcorp to expand existing end-to-end solutions for drug and diagnostics development, commercialization and clinical trial efforts to include large-scale access to real-world data for research applications. By applying advanced analytics, Labcorp can help its clients improve their processes and reach better outcomes. Our substantial repository of test results can also help study sponsors more quickly and accurately assess patient eligibility for clinical trials, enroll patients faster and accelerate the availability of new medicines.”
Dr. Paul Kirchgraber, CEO of Labcorp Drug Development
Now more than ever, study sponsors are seeing the potential of RWD to yield longitudinal patient insights before, during and after trials. With more predictive analytics and artificial intelligence applications requiring comprehensive and fully interoperable RWD, Labcorp can align de-identified patient data with ten times greater accuracy2 than industry alternatives by using the HealthVerity IPGE platform. In addition, access to HealthVerity’s RWD with on-demand de-identification and data linkage capabilities reinforces Labcorp’s ability to be a trusted source of information for its clients.
"Fragmentation of patient data is at an all-time high, and the goal is no longer just connecting this data," said Andrew Kress, CEO of HealthVerity. "Rather, the goal is making data more accessible and useful for gaining a detailed understanding of patient journeys. With analytics and applications requiring more frictionless access to the data itself, the HealthVerity IPGE platform stands alone in offering the ability to combine transaction-level patient data in a de-identified, fully interoperable manner, and delivering it directly into the client's applications of choice."
About Labcorp
Labcorp is a leading global life sciences company that provides vital information to help doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and patients make clear and confident decisions. Through our unparalleled diagnostics and drug development capabilities, we provide insights and accelerate innovations to improve health and improve lives. With over 75,000 employees, we serve clients in more than 100 countries. Labcorp (NYSE: LH) reported revenue of $16 billion in FY2021.
About HealthVerity
Pharmaceutical manufacturers, payers, and government organizations have partnered with HealthVerity to solve some of their most complicated use cases through transformative technologies and real-world data infrastructure. The HealthVerity IPGE platform, based on the foundational elements of Identity, Privacy, Governance, and Exchange, enables the discovery of real-world data across the broadest healthcare data ecosystem, the building of more complete and accurate patient journeys and the ability to power best-in-class analytics and applications with flexibility and ease. Together with our partners, HealthVerity has built the modern way to data for the health insights economy.
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