OncoHost, RayBiotech Awarded $1 Million Grant for Precision Oncology

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OncoHost and RayBiotech have been awarded a $1 million grant from the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation. The BIRD Foundation supports cooperation between U.S. and Israeli companies for developing joint products or technologies in a wide range of technology sectors that are of mutual benefit to the U.S. and Israel.

The grant will support OncoHost and RayBiotech's combined development and clinical validation of host response testing for the early prediction of treatment responsiveness in non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) patients undergoing immunotherapy. It will also be used to further develop and implement an automated slide assistance platform (ASAP) for reducing the time of large-scale protein processing as part of a new joint service: host response enrichment for pharmaceutical companies. Both of these developments will contribute towards the enablement of personalized cancer therapy for patients.

"The BIRD Foundation Board of Governors selected to support the project between OncoHost and RayBiotech on their mission to counteract therapy resistance in order to improve cancer treatment response," said Dr. Eitan Yudilevich, Executive Director of the BIRD Foundation. "This joint project contains a high level of innovation and knowledge that could benefit the treatment of lung cancer patients."

"The grant and support from the BIRD Foundation represents an important milestone for OncoHost," said Dr. Ofer Sharon, CEO of OncoHost. "We are committed to develop a system for the early identification of resistance to cancer therapy in patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), as well as a discovery tool for new drug targets. Our unique approach of host response analysis represents a significant step forward for precision oncology and personalized cancer treatment."

OncoHost's host response profiling platform PROphet™ leverages proprietary machine learning and bioinformatics technology, and will be used together with RayBiotech's high-throughput protein analysis platform to identify treatment resistance in cancer patients.

"This partnership perfectly aligns with our mission to advance precision medicine," said Dr. Ray Huang, CEO of RayBiotech. "Antibody array-based profiling of patient samples has proven a critical approach to informing personalized therapies and biomarker discovery studies, particularly in cancer research. We are eager to see how the PROphet platform can harness the power of high-throughput protein detection."