Curie-Cancer, the body responsible for developing comprehensive cancer center Institut Curie’s industry partnership activities, and GenoSplice Technology, a developer of bioinformatics solutions for analysis of genomic data, have formed a partnership to combine their expertise.

The collaboration will provide GenoSplice with access to several Curie-Cancer technology platforms to allow it to continue to improve its services to its clients. In turn, GenoSplice will be included in Institut Curie research programs and will benefit from access to the intellectual property generated during the projects. This agreement will allow GenoSplice to specifically contribute to the development of new products against cancer. The agreement also facilitates better understanding of complex diseases such as cancer through genome mapping.

GenoSplice will use Curie-Cancer’s genomic platform to continue to offer data processing to their primary client base—large pharmaceutical laboratories, biotechnology companies and academic research centers. The clients use GenoSplice to process the data gathered from high-speed sequencing and/or DNA microarrays, as well as to obtain a better understanding of the biological mechanisms involved with alternative splicing for their R&D projects.

One specific project in the collaboration will consist of defining a genomic map for prostate cancer. The map will be based on the analysis of data obtained from several hundred patients suffering from this type of cancer. The goal is twofold: to better understand the mechanisms involved in this disease and to group patients in order to guide clinicians in selecting therapeutic options.

A second project regards a new therapeutic approach in cancer treatment that will use a new type of “cell penetrating peptide” molecule. The effectiveness of one of these molecules has already been demonstrated in mice on xenograft models representative of human tumors. The purpose of the project will be to identify the predictive markers of response to this molecule in order to select the patients who are most likely to respond positively to this new treatment. GenoSplice contributes with expertise enabling the identification of these markers, which will then allow treatments to be administered to patients most effectively.