Lantern Pharma, a clinical stage oncology biotech firm headquartered in Dallas and Kearney, New Jersey is collaborating with the Developmental Therapeutics Branch (DTB) of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to help predict how a patient’s tumor may respond to drug therapy.

“Lantern believes that the convergence of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and genomic data mark the next frontier for a highly productive period in drug development, especially in cancer therapeutics,” Panna Sharma, Lantern Pharma’s CEO, said in a statement.

Lantern Pharma’s and NCI’s platforms are expected to more accurately predict how unique tumors will respond to specific drug classes and therapeutics through this collaboration.

NCI’s DTB is a reflection “of the vast potential for cancer therapeutics developed using precision oncology, ultimately benefiting medical practitioners, the investor community, and most importantly—patients and their families,” according to Sharma.

Lantern Pharma plans to use CellMiner platforms

During the collaboration, the companies expect to use the CellMiner and CellMinerCDB platforms and apply models and algorithms to see how well the tumors respond to different drugs.

A freely available tool, NCI’s CellMiner organizes and stores data representing multiple types of molecular characterizations, according to NCI. Lantern Pharma will be able to draw on NCI-generated datasets with its own drug candidate profiles via CellMiner.

The analyses are expected to deliver more insights into how Lantern’s drug candidates work in pre-clinical and clinical development.

Lantern Pharma also intends to narrow down the signatures predictive of drug effectiveness into a list of candidate biomarkers, which will be experimentally validated.

Lantern Pharma and NCI intend to work together on the publication of research results generated by the collaboration.