zPREDICTA Announces Revolutionary Cancer Drug Testing Platform
San Jose, California (PRWEB) June 06, 2016 -- zPREDICTA™ today announces the immediate availability of its Reconstructed Bone Marrow (r-Bone™) platform, providing a radical shift in drug testing approach since the 1950s. r-Bone mimics how cells behave in the human body allowing cancer treatments to be tested under the same conditions as would be encountered in a patient. r-Bone helps identify drug candidates for blood cancers, which will ultimately work in patients, and thus, eliminates the guesswork from drug development. r-Bone is already being used in closed pilot programs by customers from 8 major pharmaceutical companies and leading universities, conducting thousands of tests on new anti-cancer drugs.
Methodologies used today to determine which drug candidates will advance to human trials comprise of plastic petri dishes and animals. These models show little predictive value when it comes to identifying the drugs that will demonstrate clinical benefit with over 90% of anticancer drugs failing human trials because they do not work in patients. The r-Bone platform reconstructs human biology where drugs can be tested directly against patients cells, a capability currently lacking in pharmaceutical industry.
"We would like a system that mimics the physiological bone marrow environment so we can work with patient AML bone marrow cells directly," said Hongmin Chen, Principal Scientist at Merck & Co., Inc. who has been working with zPredicta r-Bone kits.
r-Bone is the first product in zPREDICTA’s pipeline covering both blood cancers and solid tumors suitable for use with any drug class, including new immuno-oncology interventions, testing which presents a unique set of challenges not addressed by the available systems. Each product developed by zPREDICTA recreates a specific organ and incorporates specific conditions that arise due to disease. zPREDICTA’s technology provides a comprehensive platform that mimics human biology, which simple enough to be is easily incorporated into the existing drug development workflow. zPREDICTA performs thorough evaluation of each of its product through multiple peer-reviewed studies that validate its technology and demonstrate clinical relevance.
“By more accurately recreating the environment found inside the human body, zPREDICTA’s technology promises to dramatically reduce the time and money required to develop new anti-cancer drugs,” said Paul Buchheit, managing partner at Y Combinator and creator of GMail. “When we decide to invest in a company we look for breakthrough technology and a team that will be able to execute the vision, zPREDICTA has both.”
About zPREDICTA
zPREDICTA, headquartered in San Jose, California is a biotechnology company founded in 2014 by 2 Ph.D. scientists, Julia Kirshner and Mukti Parikh on the principle that cures for human diseases require laboratory systems centered on human biology. zPREDICTA, backed by Y Combinator, the premier Bay Area accelerator, is a pioneer in organ-specific and disease-specific platforms for cancer drug testing. zPREDICTA technology demonstrates high clinical relevance allowing our pharma partners to identify drugs that will be effective in patients, from the hundreds, and often thousands, of compounds in development. The mission of zPREDICTA is to eliminate the guesswork from drug development, and thus, reduce the time and cost of bringing life-saving therapies to market.
Julia Kirshner, zPREDICTA, http://www.zpredicta.com, +1 650-739-5472, [email protected]
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