Lantern Pharma has reached an agreement to collaborate with India-based AI and data analytics company, Intuition Systems. Lantern Pharma is a privately held, global biotech company pioneering the field of precision oncology. Lantern’s proprietary approach to drug development is driven by advanced genomics and machine learning-based artificial intelligence (AI), which when combined, are advancing a new wave of precision drug therapies that significantly reduce the time to market and overall risk associated with drug development. Intuition will work closely with Lantern’s existing computational team to bring additional AI, big data analysis, cloud support and infrastructure to support drug development and biomarker identification.

The treatment of cancer represents a large market with many underserved areas where precision therapies will be highly valued. As part of the collaboration, Lantern’s lead computational biologists will utilize Intuition’s platform to analyze and identify the relevant predictive biomarkers from clinical and genomic datasets. This analyzed data will be co-related to patients’ responses for Lantern’s clinical stage drugs.

“The more clinical and genomic data that is analyzed, the ‘smarter’ the AI becomes, which will lead to additional breakthroughs. We are very excited to assist Lantern in its pursuit to re-invent cancer drug development using advanced AI and genomics. This partnership accelerates the development of therapies at a faster and more efficient rate than ever before,” said Anand A., chief executive officer of Intuition Systems.

Rather than discovering drugs from scratch, Lantern identifies, partners or acquires, late-stage clinical drugs that show efficacy in a small number of patients. These abandoned drugs are ‘rescued and repurposed’ using molecular profiling to identify the specific patients who respond favorably to treatment. Responding patients are screened for a response biomarker, stratified and treated in a narrow scope of clinical trials. This process of targeting certain genomic profiles creates truly precise therapies and addresses a significant unmet need in the cancer market.

“We are excited about this partnership and believe it will generate excellent results,” said Arun Asaithambi, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Lantern Pharma. “Combining Intuition’s proven platform, which has been applied successfully in other technology applications, with Lantern’s existing proprietary computational resources will advance our efforts in developing new drugs and novel treatments to patients in need. This collaboration marks another step towards reinventing the clinical development of cancer therapies.”