EMD Serono, the healthcare business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, and MD Anderson Cancer Center announced a three-year strategic collaboration, with the aim of more quickly advancing the development of investigational cancer therapies in four cancers–breast, colorectal, glioblastoma and leukemia.
EMD Serono will be the first company to gain access to the Adaptive Patient-Oriented Longitudinal Learning and Optimization Platform (APOLLO)—MD Anderson’s research platform that standardizes the long-term collection of patients’ medical history and data derived from tissue samples to better understand the biology of cancer and accelerate research-driven patient care.
The collaboration will encompass both biomarker-focused pre-clinical research and clinical trials in specific tumor types aimed at identifying biomarkers of response and resistance and developing a better understanding of the disease biology.
The collaboration will enhance the value of EMD Serono’s future oncology/immuno-oncology pipeline, with a goal of multiple registrational studies in novel indications in the next two to three years. Data from APOLLO will be used to match a number of investigational compounds to select tumor types for potential development and collaboratively design biomarker-driven pre-clinical and clinical studies at MD Anderson evaluating the potential therapeutic effect of the compounds—alone or in combination.
APOLLO was developed by MD Anderson as part of its Moon Shots Program, an ambitious effort to reduce cancer deaths by more rapidly developing and implementing advances in prevention, early detection and treatment based on scientific discoveries.
