What You Should Know:
- Pangea Biomed, the startup behind the innovative treatment response predictor, ENLIGHT, today announced its partnership with patient-centric advocacy organization FibroFighters to advance treatment for fibrolamellar carcinoma (FLC) patients.
- Fibrolamellar carcinoma (FLC) is a rare liver cancer that typically presents in young adolescents and young adults at a median age of 22 who have no history of liver disease. There is no clear standard of care for the disease, and in the setting of metastatic disease, 5-year survival rates are approximately 39 percent
Expanding Horizons in the Treatment for Fibrolamellar Carcinoma
“Since FLC makes up about 1% of all primary liver cancers, there is limited data on the disease, which impedes treatment,” said Pangea CEO Tuvik Beker, Ph.D. “Fortunately, by design, ENLIGHT is able to surface relevant insights specific to a patient’s tumor even without significant training datasets.”
Using ENLIGHT, which leverages unsupervised learning and sequenced tumor transcriptomics, Pangea will suggest treatments for FLC patients that FibroFighters work with, compare treatment response predictions against treatment outcomes, as well as with ex-vivo models, and refine models for treatment response and resistance. n December 2022, Pangea published a case study in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer on the ENLIGHT-matched treatment of an FLC patient. Despite common biomarkers for immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) coming back negative, the patient went into complete remission after being treated with an ENLIGHT-matched combination of ipilimumab (anti-CTLA4) and nivolumab (anti-PD-1).