AstraZeneca is tapping Sage Bionetworks on cancer research with the aim of better matching patients with treatments and developing new therapeutics. The partnership will combine computer models of disease genetics developed at Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit biomedical research organization, with AstraZeneca’s oncology expertise.
Sage Bionetworks will have access to data on AstraZeneca’s developmental compounds. It will focus on investigating regulatory pathways among different cancers using coherent cancer genomic datasets and predictive disease models.
“Everyone truly wins in this project,” notes Stephen Friend, M.D., Ph.D., president of Sage Bionetworks. “Sage Bionetworks gets to work with an industry innovator and the resultant computational models will be placed in our public repository and available to all researchers following the completion of the project.”
Susan Galbraith, M.D., vp and head of oncology innovative medicines unit at AstraZeneca, remarks, “We are looking forward to collaborating with Sage Bionetworks to build realistic, predictive models of cancers to expand our current understanding of these diseases and potentially harness that knowledge into new target identification, portfolio positioning, and patient selection, all of which we hope will lead to new treatment options for patients.”