Turbine announced it has entered into a collaboration with AstraZeneca. Turbine will use its proprietary Simulated Cell?? platform to identify and understand mechanisms of resistance to therapy in hematological Cancers.

The collaboration will focus on understanding resistance mechanisms resulting from altered protein-protein interactions, which could enable more personalized treatment regimens based on each patient's molecular profile. Financial terms of the collaboration are not disclosed. Turbine and AstraZeneca previously collaborated using an earlier version of the Simulated Cell to predict combination synergy and relevant biomarker candidates involving DNA Damage Repair mechanisms. In this study, the team evaluated hundreds of drug combinations in multiple cancers and demonstrated that the platform is capable of predicting their effect, without training on the experimental data itself.

Simulations were used to identify potential mechanisms underlying the synergy between combinations of cancer treatments, revealing biomarkers of response and resistance that could be translated into clinical practice. The results of these studies, which demonstrated that Turbine's platform matches the predictivity while adding deeper insights into the biological complexity of response mechanisms, have been posted to the bioRxiv preprint server and have been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.