New CURATE.AI platform to successfully treat metastatic cancer patient

Groundbreaking CURATE.AI platform halts the progression of advanced cancer in the clinical study by continuously optimizing novel drug combination.

Scientists at the National University of Singapore have recently developed CURATE.AI, a powerful artificial intelligence (AI) platform, to successfully treat a patient with advanced cancer, completely halting disease progression. The platform identifies the optimal doses of each drug to result in a durable response, allowing the patient to resume a completely normal and active lifestyle.

Professor Dean Ho, Director of the Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology (SINAPSE) at NUS said, “Dynamic dosing in cancer therapy is not commonly used. In fact, drug dosing changes in oncology are typically performed only to reduce toxicity. CURATE.AI uniquely modifies drug dosing to increase efficacy.”

“Our clinical study has shown that dosing can profoundly affect the efficacy and safety of the treatment. A patient’s clinical profile changes over time. The unique ability for CURATE.AI to rapidly identify the drug doses that result in the best possible treatment outcomes allows for actionable, and perpetually optimized personalized medicine.”

Combination treatment speaks to a foundation in present-day cancer treatment. Utilizing this approach, numerous medications are utilized to assault the procedures that help cancer grow. An essential target when outlining combination treatments is to accomplish drug synergy, where the medications cooperate to generously improve efficiency.

Professor Ho said, “Patients respond to chemotherapy differently from one another. Even a single patient’s response to therapy can vary substantially over the course of treatment. In fact, many patients do not respond at all to the drug combination because the dosages, which can profoundly impact efficacy, are not suitable for them. Therefore, while fixed-dose combination therapy represents a standard of care, it may also serve as a barrier to realizing truly optimal and personalized medicine.”

To overcome the challenges of conventional combination therapy, the NUS team of engineers developed the CURATE.AI platform, which uses the patient’s own clinical data – such as their drug doses and corresponding changes to tumor sizes or levels of cancer biomarkers in the blood – to calibrate his or her unique response to treatment. This calibration is then used to create an individualized CURATE.AI profile, or map, that identifies the drug doses which enable the best possible treatment outcome at any given point in time.

In this investigation, which was directed at the UCLA Institute of Urologic Oncology for a time of over a year, a patient with metastatic prostate cancer was given ZEN-3694 and enzalutamide. Diminishing the level of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in the patient’s blood filled in as the essential biomarker to decide whether the patient was reacting to treatment. Computed tomography (CT) imaging of the cancer injuries observed the degree of illness movement.

At first, the dosages of ZEN-3694 and enzalutamide were balanced by the clinicians to all the more likely oversee patient-reported personal satisfaction. The patient’s underlying medication measurements and PSA levels were then used to build his customized CURATE.AI profile. Astoundingly, CURATE.AI in this manner recognized a ZEN-3694 measurement that was 50 for every penny lower than the patient’s beginning dosage of the medication preceding CURATE.AI examination.

Prospective dosage guidance by CURATE.AI resulted in the lowest PSA levels observed for the patient during the course of the study. As treatment progressed, slight increases in ZEN-3694 dosing resulted in clear decreases in PSA levels, also demonstrating its key role in suppressing metastatic cancer. CT imaging of the patient’s lesions showed that disease progression was halted as a result of CURATE.AI-guided combination therapy of both ZEN-3694 and enzalutamide. Patient care guided by CURATE.AI is currently ongoing.

Prof Ho said, “Using CURATE.AI to dynamically modify drug doses and successfully treat a metastatic cancer patient represents a landmark breakthrough for the use of AI to truly personalize patient care. This advance is expected to dramatically improve response rates for all combination therapies that are being developed for oncology as well as virtually all other diseases. We can also expect CURATE.AI to markedly reduce the costs of drug development.”

“The implementation of CURATE.AI represents a game-changing shift in the way that combination therapy can be optimized at the single patient level, and we have shown that N-of-1 medicine can be a reality. We are excited that CURATE.AI could ultimately enhance patient access to important new combination therapies, saving lives in the process.”

Dr. Allan Pantuck, the lead clinician of the study, added, “With fixed-dose therapy, patients are often switched to other drugs when they no longer respond to treatment. However, CURATE.AI has shown that patients can still respond to the therapies that have seemingly stopped working by continuously identifying the patient’s optimal dosing parameters.”

The findings were published in Advanced Therapeutics on 29 August 2018.

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