4baseCare, ACTREC-TMC to develop AI based clinical decision-making tool

AI driven tool to support oncologists in clinical decision-making and to offer precision medicine to cancer patients in India, through the personalisation of treatment

4basecare, an Illumina Accelerator backed Precision Oncology start-up and ACTREC (Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer) – Tata Memorial Centre have signed a collaboration agreement for an AI driven clinical interpretation platform, ClinOme.

The collaboration aims at making an indigenous platform to generate data insights and simplified reports to guide oncologists with personalised treatment options for treating cancer patients. As per a press statement, ClinOme is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) based automated tool developed by senior scientists and clinicians from ACTREC and Tata Memorial Hospital by Dr Amit Dutt, Dr Pratik Chandrani and Dr Kumar Prabhash for analysis of raw NGS data followed by comprehensive clinical report generation.

It reportedly automates quality check, primary, secondary and tertiary analysis of raw NGS data followed by report generation that can be easily comprehended by the clinicians. It provides easy to interpret categorisation of genomic alterations along with approved and experimental therapeutic options for each responsive and resistant genotype-drug combination. (see work flow in image)

Dr. Amit Dutt, Principal Investigator, Scientist, ACTREC -Tata Memorial Hospital said, “Patient-to-patient variation in treatment response as observed routinely in clinics, suggests that personal targeting of cancer, based on tumour molecular profiles, is necessary. The ClinOme tool and our collaborative work with 4baseCare is likely to benefit large numbers of oncologists in a democratic manner who could take advantage of artificial intelligence-based automation of NGS data analysis to decide an appropriate therapeutic regimen tailored to the patient’s genomic alterations. This is a huge step forward to scale the digital curation towards precision medicine.”

With an exclusive worldwide licence to ClinOme, 4baseCare plans to invest significant time and resources to further develop and enhance the functionality and precision of ClinOme, according to the statement.

“We are very happy to associate with ACTREC_TMC to introduce ClinOme. The objective of this collaboration is to improve the treatment process and enhancing patients’ quality of life. This partnership is a first step towards developing an advanced ecosystem where researchers and clinicians practice together leading to the development of a solution which has immediate translational benefits for the patients”, said Kshitij Rishi, COO, 4baseCare.

“We at 4baseCare are excited to build upon the remarkable research-based product developed by ACTREC-TMC as a robust AI driven platform to support the oncologist(s) in their clinical decision making”, said Hitesh Goswami CEO, 4baseCare

This collaboration will set a great precedence for industry-academia collaboration towards translational research. It will also be a huge step towards personalisation of treatment for Indian cancer patients and aligns with the vision of both ACTREC-TMC and 4baseCare of improving quality of life and treatment of cancer patients of the country

“Genomic testing has become important in the management of cancer. NGS is emerging as a comprehensive solution for genomic testing. It is a complex process where the bioinformatics pipeline is a very important component. ClinOme provides a very useful indigenous solution in this area”, says Dr. Kumar Prabhash, Professor and Medical Oncologist, Tata Memorial Hospital.

The output of ClinOme analysis consists of a report with detailed patient centric genotype to help design an informed therapeutic option. The output report also consists of links to the specific ongoing clinical trials, gene wise coverage statistics and allelic frequency of the genomic variants.

“While genomics data analysis is a challenge, evidence based therapeutic inference is altogether another challenge. ClinOme addresses both of the challenges using a combination of genomics best practices and artificial-intelligence powered evidence based therapeutic inference”, says Dr. Pratik Chanarani, Scientific Officer, ACTREC-Tata Memorial Hospital.