The main thrust for surgically incurable cancers is in disease palliation, with barely a handful of cancers that can be cured. The role of biology is significant considering genetic signatures can indicate an individual’s susceptibility to a disease, identifying the most effective treatments and predicting toxicity. The ability to look at the background biology or genetics of a tumor as well as tumor markers using smart data makes it possible to design highly effective and commercially viable oncology drugs.
Advances in precision medicine and big data analytics has the potential to revolutionize drug development and deployment strategy in cancer therapeutics. As a revolutionary approach to cancer treatment, it is targeted and purposeful, delivering personalised holistic treatment based on specific biomarkers. Its advantage lies in carefully stratifying patients into groups based on their individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle, and delivering medications while avoiding side effects. By targeting specific factors that make one individual’s cancer different from the other, the treatment becomes more precise, has a better success rate and improves the patient journey, reducing treatment costs.
The role of biomarkers in the early detection and monitoring of cancers as well as the development of cancer therapeutics is an important paradigm shift away from cytotoxic chemotherapy. Presently, the vast majority of experimental cancer therapeutics fail in the later stages of clinical development, when considerable time and expense has already been incurred. A biomarker strategy can assist in selecting out molecules likely to be ineffective, speeding up our efforts in finding therapies with true potential.
AUM’s business model is distinct from that of any other players in this space. We mandate biomarkers for asset selection and conduct trials to improve the probability of success over conventional approaches. We focus on rapidly developing affordable small molecules relevant to the Asian, and ultimately the global market.