Immediate Future Plans

AI for Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC)

In spite of impressive advances, the biggest unmet needs for metastatic TNBC is the lack of good targeted treatments and the heavy reliance on chemotherapy, or chemotherapy-based approaches. It is the most malignant subtype of breast cancer with a poor prognosis. There is a need for new therapies, but it is difficult to find drugs with clinical benefits. TNBC includes many signaling pathways and genes that regulate malignant transformation, prevention of apoptosis, cause drug resistance, metastasis, cell growth, survival, proliferation and migration (EGFR, VEGF, PI3K, mTOR, AKT, K-RAS, etc.). Many targets and agents are involved in the current treatment of TNBC, to mention a few: immune cells, tumor stroma, cell surface and intracellular receptors, pathways, DNA damage response, cell cycle checkpoint, germline mutations in BRCA1/2 (gBRCA1/2), etc. Information about TNBC is included in voluminous non multimodal and multimodal data. AI is adept at analyzing immense complex interactions between a large number of variables in vast datasets to drive actionable insights, resulting in the discovery of new drugs and robust biomarkers. What adds to the complexity of the treatment is its dependence on TNBC subtypes and the stage of the disease. 

The hype around AI has led to the impression that AI is an easy solution to all problems. This is a fallacy. The effectiveness of an AI solution depends on the nature of the problem and the required accuracy.

New Therapies and Improving Existing Therapies

Iteru’s AI platform holds great promise for TNBC research. It provides what could be the largest amount of existing integrated data. More data leads to better AI results. A researcher can define the objective of analysis to focus on specific potential therapies. The data will be used to identify new targets and new TNBC biomarkers. It will also be used to explore means to increase the efficacy of existing drugs and to minimize drug resistance. By using Iteru’s automatic data labeling tool, a scientist can isolate data for different types of research, for instance “TNBC immunotherapy”, “TNBC vaccines”, etc.

Iteru employs a two-pronged approach to determine new therapies for TNBC: Discover New Therapies and Improving Current Therapies.

Improving Current Therapies

TNBC is a difficult and complex disease entity that is both confusing and frustrating for researchers. Although target-based therapeutic options are approved for other cancers, only limited therapeutic options are available for TNBC. Reported promising targeted therapies are :

  1. Poly (ADP Ribose) Polymerase Inhibitors.
  2. EGFR (stimulates growth factor signaling pathways).
  3. Fibroblast Growth Factor (FGF).
  4. Androgen Receptor (AR).
  5. PDGF/VEGFR (platelet-derived growth factor).
  6. Inhibition of CHK1/2.
  7. Inhibitor of Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs).
  8. PI3K Inhibitors.
  9. Immunotherapy.
  10. Cancer Stem-Like Cell Therapy.
  11. Prognostic biomarkers in TNBC.

Iteru will run initial investigations to prioritize the above therapies. After prioritizing the therapies, Iteru will perform detailed AI analysis on the top 3 to find out if the therapies could be improved.

Pharma Digitization

The main challenges to pharma digitization are the large number of data types, data stored in inaccessible silos and the voluminous size of the data. Iteru platform tears down data silos to build a data lake scalable to up to 1 petabyte. Scalability and inclusion of many data types provide a paradigm for pharma digitization. The paradigm enables pharma to build applications related to operational processes, strategic innovation, risk assessment, regulatory compliance and others.