A multi-drug phosphoproteomic diagnostic and cancer treatment selection algorithm for precision medicine

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Decades of intensive research has produced a wealth of anticancer treatments. A problem for the success of these therapies is that not all patients will respond to treatments in the same way, so some may respond well to a treatment while others respond poorly to that same treatment. It is difficult therefore to know, or predict, which patients will be responders or non-responders to the growing number of available drugs.This project addresses this clinical, societal and economic challenge. We propose the development of a new type of diagnostic test based on predictive protein activity signatures, that will be able to distinguish how well a patient is likely to respond to different anticancer drugs.While several competing technologies in the field of precision medicine diagnostics now exist, Kinomica's solution has a competitive advantage because it is based on measuring the activity, rather than just mutations or abundance levels, of proteins that drive cancer growth and are the targets of drugs designed to block cancer growth.The project builds from previous work, in part funded by Innovate UK, where we demonstrated that our technology predicted responses to a treatment (midostaurin plus chemotherapy) for an aggressive form of leukaemia, with much greater accuracy than when using the currently approved diagnostic tests (based on gene mutation analysis).Successful completion of the project will provide a test that can select the best drug for each leukaemia patient from the growing number of available treatments, thus improving response rates, survival times and quality of life. Furthermore, this work will lead to new and improved methods, inventions and improved diagnostics to help clinicians treat their cancer patients effectively. The outputs will be made public in high-impact publications and presentations in conferences. Importantly, the project will deliver a novel diagnostic technology that could be applied to help more effectively treat other cancers beyond leukaemia.This project will change our R&D activities by unlocking additional private funding, and opens the prospect of creating a centre of excellence in precision medicine diagnostics in the North West of England, with the positive consequent implications for economic development in the area.