Compendia Bioscience and H3 Biomedicine are joining forces to leverage genomics in the development of cancer therapeutics. The companies signed a three-year licensing agreement that gives H3 access to Compendia's full suite of Oncomine tools. The firms will also work together to discover novel therapeutic targets and biomarkers to support drug development.
Oncomine combines a growing compendium of 62,000+ curated cancer genomic profiles with an analysis engine and web applications for data mining and visualization. Included in the licensing arrangement are the Oncomine Concepts Edition and Oncomine Power Tools Edition. The Concepts Edition is a web application that integrates high-throughput cancer profiling data so that target expression across a variety of cancer types, subtypes, and experiments can be assessed online. Additionally, it allows users to search the Oncomine database for enrichment of user-defined gene signatures. Oncomine Power Tools provide an interactive and visual environment for interrogating new data.
The companies will also partner to find new targets as well as develop biomarkers for drug R&D. To this end they will mine data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). "As we aim to develop H3 into a potent cancer drug discovery enterprise, it is clear that we need to partner with companies such as Compendia that think about cancer in the same way we do, that believe the development of cancer therapeutics begins with a clear understanding of the molecular characteristics and diversity of cancer patients," says Markus Warmuth, M.D., CEO of H3 Biomedicine.