Ozette Technologies, Inc., a technology-driven life sciences company, announced its collaboration with Umoja Biopharma, Inc., a transformative immuno-oncology company creating off-the-shelf treatments for solid and hematologic cancers. Umoja will use Ozette’s AI-powered single-cell technology for their preclinical studies.
As part of this work, the Ozette Platform™ will be used to provide research and development (R&D) support and evaluate biomarker endpoints from preclinical tumor-bearing, humanized mouse models. Humanized mouse models are often deployed in preclinical studies as a tool for modeling human immune responses in the evaluation of potential therapeutics and treatment effects before first-in-human studies. The goal of this collaboration is to help derive insights that have the potential to catalyze Umoja’s therapeutic program development.
“Our mission is to unlock the power of the immune system using computation and machine learning. As a result, we can quickly understand how the immune system is evolving and what that means for a therapy and a patient at the single-cell level,” said Dr. Ali Ansary, CEO and Co-founder of Ozette. “This collaboration with Umoja is an important opportunity to continue showcasing Ozette’s technology and innovative impact on the vast variety of therapeutic indications, including cutting-edge T-cell treatments.”
Umoja and Ozette share a common mission to increase the efficiency of drug development and expand access to transformative immunotherapies through technology innovation. The partnership will leverage Ozette Endpoints™ and Ozette Discovery™ to enable both companies' multidisciplinary scientific and bioinformatic teams to collaborate and expand the benefits of CAR T-cell immunotherapy to patients in need.
“Our collaboration with Ozette is the next step in expanding the value of our preclinical data by leveraging their advanced single-cell technology,” said Ryan Larson, Ph.D., Senior Vice President of Translational Science at Umoja. “The Ozette Platform will allow us to efficiently distill complex biology, that traditionally relies on manual analysis, into actionable insights rapidly. Together, we’re able to gather a deeper and wider set of preclinical insights from our data which, in turn, allows us to increase the efficiency of developing our transformative therapeutics. We’re excited to expand our R&D efforts with Ozette on broader applications at Umoja.”
About Ozette
Ozette Technologies, Inc. is engineering a transformative leap in measuring and understanding the immune system. The Seattle-based life sciences company is building a groundbreaking high-resolution, single-cell immune monitoring platform and corpus of high-resolution data leveraging its differentiated novel ML technologies. Ozette’s Assay-to-Insights product launch combines three technologies developed by the company: world-class data generation at the Ozette Laboratory under Good Clinical Laboratory Practices (GCLP) guidelines, rapid computational monitoring of pre-defined biomarker endpoints using Ozette Endpoints™, and unbiased discovery and annotation of single-cell data through Ozette Discovery™. Insights generated from Ozette Endpoints™ and Ozette Discovery™ are made available through the Ozette Platform™, a cloud-based system that leverages automation enabling scientific teams to interact and explore their data. Founded in late 2020, Ozette was spun-out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and incubated at the Allen Institute for AI. Ozette has since published their technology in a number of journals including Nature, Science, and Cell. Ozette’s interdisciplinary team is made up of a deep bench of scientists, statisticians, engineers, and designers with a wide range of experience spanning Genentech, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Airbnb, and more. Ozette’s team also includes leaders and pioneers in the field of medical research and single-cell analysis, including founders: physician Ali Ansary, and scientists Greg Finak, Evan Greene, and Raphael Gottardo. Ozette believes that mapping and studying the complexity of the immune system unlocks insights that accelerate research and ultimately derive better immunotherapies; we believe in better data.
About Umoja Biopharma
Umoja Biopharma, Inc. is an early clinical-stage company advancing an entirely new approach to immunotherapy. The Company is a transformative multi-platform immuno-oncology company founded with the goal of creating curative treatments for solid and hematological malignancies. Founded based on pioneering work performed at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Purdue University, Umoja’s novel approach is powered by integrated cellular immunotherapy technologies including the VivoVec™ off-the-shelf in vivo delivery platform, the RACR™/CAR in vivo cell expansion/control platform, and the TumorTag™ targeting platform. Designed from the ground up to work together, these platforms are being developed to create and harness a powerful immune response in the body to directly, safely, and controllably attack cancer. Umoja believes that its approach can provide broader access to the most advanced immunotherapies and enable more patients to live better, fuller lives.