C4XD and Garvan Institute of Medical Research have reported success in matching patients with Parkinson’s disease to the right treatment, using its new precision medicine platform.
Drug development company, C4XD, has launched its precision medicine platform, PatientSeek, following insights from a successful research collaboration with Garvan Institute of Medical Research.
As part of a collaboration, C4XD, provided Garvan Institute with the genetic signatures for its PatientSeek sub-groups in Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers then applied this as part of a retrospective analysis of a failed Phase 3 Parkinson’s clinical trial that had not reached its primary endpoint, to assess if a genetic subgroup of participants showed a benefit from the therapeutic. PatientSeek identified a subgroup that responded to the trial drug.
These insights into Parkinson’s disease have the potential to help identify the most effective treatments and match them with groups of patients who are most likely to benefit, accelerating the drug development process.
The results provide the first validation of PatientSeek’s ability to identify patient subgroups to optimise patient selection, which in turn could lead to enhanced probability of targeted success in clinical trials.
Whilst this study was focused on Parkinson’s disease the PatientSeek platform is disease agnostic and is designed to be applied to any complex genetic disease. The results from this study are expected to be submitted for publication in a peer reviewed journal in due course.
Garvan research partner, Associate Professor Antony Cooper, research director of the Australian Parkinson’s Mission, said: “This is a very important result which not only demonstrates that subgroups derived with PatientSeek are clinically relevant, but also reaffirms the important role that genetics play in Parkinson’s disease, including response to treatment.
“These findings have wide-reaching implications for patients, clinicians and researchers, and have advanced a key goal of the Australian Parkinson’s Mission of expanding precision medicine approaches to identify effective therapeutics for people with Parkinson’s disease. We will now focus on the mechanistic understanding of the differences between the patient subgroups identified to accelerate our understanding of the disease heterogeneity observed in Parkinson’s disease”.
Dr Richard Wyse, director of Clinical Development at Cure Parkinson’s who introduced C4XD to Garvan Institute, said: “This work has enormous potential and paves the way for novel approaches to stratify patients in disease modifying Parkinson’s trials. Such approaches could inform clinical trial design, better select patients for their likelihood to be responders to specific therapeutics, and help enable development of companion diagnostics. This is a ground-breaking result and an important milestone in bringing precision medicine to patients.”
Dr Clare Murray, SVP Drug Discovery at C4XD, said: “Our new PatientSeek platform is the result of a successful Taxonomy3® collaboration with Garvan Institute. Taxonomy3® has historically been used for target identification, but this study clearly demonstrates the potential to use PatientSeek to apply our unique mathematical approach to stratify patients for novel treatments based on their genetics. C4XD has already identified PatientSeek subgroups in immuno-inflammatory disease and we will be exploring their application in bringing precision medicine approaches to these patient populations.”