OncoHost Offers New Hope For Cancer Sufferers

Original source here.

Israel’s OncoHost is developing a new ways to test the blood of cancer patients in order to determine which treatments will be the most effective.

OncoHost offers what it describes as personalized strategies to maximize the success of cancer therapy. It has a proprietary proteomic analysis which the company says can be used to understand an individual patient’s unique response to therapy in order to overcome one of the major obstacles in clinical oncology today – resistance to therapy.

Startup Nation is not just about new gadgets, social media or better telecommunications. Israel has always been at the center of medical innovation and will continue to be a hub for the advancement of medical treatments.

Early detection is paramount in any successful treatment of cancer. And once the cancer has been uncovered doctors must tailor a course of treatment which suits the individual patient. Not every person responds in the same way to the same cancer treatments for the same type of cancer.

This has been a serious impediment to success. If the right treatment can be selected at the beginning then the chances of recovery will be greater. As with any disease, time is of the essence.

OncoHost’s abstract on the use of plasma-based proteomic profiling as a tool for predicting response to immunotherapy in melanoma patients was accepted for the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer’s (SITC) 35th Anniversary Annual Meeting. The presentation took place on November 14. The clinical study was conducted in collaboration with the University of Connecticut, Yale University’s Cancer Center and the Technion Institute of Technology.

“Our efforts in overcoming this major topic of concern in oncology – resistance to immunotherapy treatment – continues. Many studies have focused on tumor-related changes as the basis of resistance, however, in recent years, studies have indicated that in response to almost any type of anti-cancer therapy, the patient (the host) is a vital component,” says Ofer Sharon, MD, CEO of OncoHost.

“Our aim is to generate a tool that is clinically insightful for oncologists and can identify patient-specifi­c targets, improving overall outcomes and reducing unnecessary side effects experienced by so many patients. Melanoma is just the beginning.”