Image of Oslo Cancer Cluster Innovation Park

Meet the new members from 2021

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Last year, we had the pleasure of welcoming 14 new members to Oslo Cancer Cluster.

In this brief overview, we are proud to introduce the new ensemble of cutting-edge cancer and science-related businesses – and a university.

 

Bio-Me AS has created a platform for precision microbiome profiling, which takes the vast knowledge of the microbiome to something that can be used in a clinical setting.

Daiichi-Sankyo is a global pharmaceutical company originating from Japan and with European headquarters in Germany. Daiichi-Sankyo has recently also set up a Nordic headquarter in Copenhagen with more than 20 employees.

Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) is working on an exciting initiative to bring artificial intelligence (AI) and product design services together with healthcare and nursing, so that new projects can be launched in the research world.

You can read more about our members Bio-Me AS, Daiichi-Sankyo and OsloMet in this news article from June 2021.

 

Alv B is developing new immune therapy for solid cancers in cats and dogs. The new therapy will be available both as a supplement to standard treatments as well as a replacement for chemotherapy with strong side effects.

Comunin is a Norwegian start-up that provides a digital platform for smart patient monitoring and support.

Canica is a large, privately-owned investment company operating out of Norway and Switzerland, with core expertise within the fields of business development, retail, brand development and finance. It is focused on creating long-term value and employment.

Do More Diagnostics is a Norwegian start-up on a mission to transform cancer diagnostics with artificial intelligence. The goal is to improve patient care and make drug development more effective by utilizing artificial intelligence to increase the prognostic value of cancer tissue biopsies.

Glycanostics is a start-up company established in 2017 to bring its cancer diagnostics products to the EU and US markets. The company aims for early and more accurate cancer detection to prevent unnecessary biopsies and increase patient survival rate, and their product portfolio includes prostate and breast cancer non-invasive diagnostic kits and technology for glycan biomarker detection.

Hemispherian is an innovative preclinical pharmaceutical company focused on developing a novel class of small molecule drugs. These drugs target the TET2 enzyme as an epigenetic therapy for particularly aggressive cancers.

NordicRWE is a Norwegian Real-world Evidence (RWE) start-up company that has the ambition to be at the forefront of the data-driven drug development process. By tapping into the Nordic health data with its long follow-ups, incomparable completeness, and extensive linking possibilities, NordicRWE is uniquely positioned to be a key player in the forthcoming evolution of the RWE supported drug R&D.

You can read more about NordicRWE in this news article from September.

 

Norimun is a start-up and part of the OCC Incubator Accelerator programme. The company develops antibodies from the eggs of immunized hens. These IgY antibodies are currently used for passive immunization in aquaculture and livestock, as an alternative and supplement to the body’s own immune system.

Oncosyne is a start-up and part of the OCC Incubator Accelerator programme. The company will develop tests for the patient’s cancer cells and provide information about which treatments the patient will benefit from and which will not be of benefit.

OÜ Antegenes is an Estonian medical technology company founded in 2018. As a registered healthcare service provider of medical genetics, oncology and laboratory services in Estonia, the company uses high-tech polygenic risk score technology to assess a person’s genetic risk of developing cancer.

Randstad Care is dedicated to elevating the quality of talent available to meet the changing resource demands across life sciences organizations. Randstad’s recruiters combine their scientific, pharma and outsourcing expertise with an understanding of individual business needs to deliver the right talent, right away.

You can read more about our members by visiting the Membership Overview and learn about our upcoming events in the Event Calendar. 

Hands holding a tablet with a gridKaiku Health

Collaborating on patient self-monitoring

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Patients report their own symptoms in a new project at Ahus, in which the university hospital collaborates with Roche and Kaiku Health.

A new project with 15 lung cancer patients has started this fall at Akershus University Hospital (Ahus), one of Norway’s largest hospitals, just outside of Oslo. Both the patients and the hospital staff are testing a new digital patient monitoring and management solution from the Finnish health technology company Kaiku Health, where the patients themselves are to report their symptoms and health conditions.

The project is a successful collaboration between patients and hospital staff at Ahus, the company Roche, and Kaiku Health. They are all members of Oslo Cancer Cluster.

Satisfied patients

“So far we have received almost only positive user experiences. Patients are only asked to log symptoms they have had and do not have to consider all kinds of possible symptoms they might have. That helps them and our impression is that the patients are satisfied with the self-logging tool we are testing,” said Anne Edvardsen, Project Leader and Department Leader at the Lung Department at Ahus.

Anne Edvardsen. Photo: Ahus

Anne Edvardsen. Photo: Ahus

Kaiku Health is a digital health interventions platform that provides patient-reported outcomes, monitoring, and intelligent symptom tracking. Currently, it is used in more than 75 clinics in Europe and America, helping clinicians provide optimized care with early interventions and personalized patient support.

Digital symptom management

“Digital symptom management is shown to improve patients’ overall survival and quality of life. While cancer immunotherapy has been shown to advance treatment outcomes of for example lung cancer patients, it has also introduced a new kind of safety profile. Companion digital health solutions can optimize symptom management and timely education for patients. In addition, clinics benefit from the use of the service, as digital therapy support can optimize the use of healthcare resources as well as processes in the daily clinic routine,” said Ann-Sofie Andersson-Ward, Global Strategic Sales Manager in Kaiku Health.

Ann-Sofie Andersson-Ward. Photo: Kaiku Health/ Kajsas foto

Ann-Sofie Andersson-Ward. Photo: Kaiku Health/ Kajsas foto

In Nordlandssykehuset, a smaller hospital in the north of Norway, a similar digital patient monitoring, also from Kaiku, is already a part of the regular patient treatment.

“By providing digital symptom management along with the capture and analysis of real-world data, Kaiku Health paves way for more personalised and value-based healthcare,” said Ann-Sofie Andersson-Ward.

Testing in several stages

Roche aims to deliver their digital patient monitoring and management solutions in an open ecosystem approach in collaboration with various industry partners and solution providers, such as Kaiku Health, and has done a prior pilot project with Kaiku Health in Germany, Finland, and Switzerland.

The results from this first pilot were published in Journal of Medical Internet Research in December last year and show a high user satisfaction and improved clinical care besides other benefits and a few challenges. You can read the article here. https://www.jmir.org/2020/12/e18655/

“With our current collaboration with Ahus, Roche aims to deliver industry-leading Digital Patient Monitoring and Management solutions that improve outcomes that matter to patients, such as quality of life and overall survival, for individuals receiving therapy for advanced or metastasized cancers. This can be achieved by empowering patients to continuously report symptoms from any location using mobile solutions and enabling healthcare professionals to intervene early before symptoms worsen, tailor care plans, and make effective treatment decisions. By using solutions that are seamlessly integrated into clinical care, it would also optimise healthcare resource utilization. In addition, we’re also exploring user experience of the solution alongside understanding how we can support broad adoption and adherence to the solutions,” said Fabienne O. Villars, Country Medical Manager for Lung in Roche Norway, and adds that it is also an important project to explore local requirements and regulatory needs.

Woman in white jacket looking into camera

Fabienne O. Villars. Photo: Roche

The current project is named KAISER and will run until March 2022.

Better equipped to master symptoms

“An advantage is that we can monitor the patients during the entire treatment and systemize our experiences. This kind of monitoring of symptoms through digital platforms is important to increase the understanding the patients have of their own health. When they participate in monitoring their own symptoms and changes in symptoms, they are better equipped to master their symptoms, with assistance by healthcare professionals,” said Anne Edvardsen.

The patients can use the tool as a type of diary for symptoms from cancer treatment, like for example fatigue, and the care team can look for patterns to check if treatments are working well. The hospital staff is learning how to react to the reports and whether they should follow up with the patients more closely based on the reported symptoms.

Useful in the future

“It has been a good collaboration where everyone has contributed to solving this puzzle, which takes a lot of effort ensuring privacy and data security in a large hospital like Ahus,” said Anne Edvardsen.

“The work Ahus has done in collaboration with us will become useful in the future for sure –for other hospitals, companies, and for the patients themselves,” said Villars.

Read more

Inven2 has contributed to initiating the project in Norway and has written about it in Norwegian. Read the Norwegian article here: https://www.inven2.com/prover-ut-digitalt-verktoy-for-pasientoppfolging-i-kliniske-studier/

Cluster Collaborations

In this article series, called Cluster Collaborations, we want to highlight the fruitful collaborations in the cluster, underlining the very essence of what Oslo Cancer Cluster is all about, from cancer research to cure.

Picture of Carlos de Sause, CEO of ultimovacs

Ultimovacs to launch new clinical study

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Ultimovacs announces a new clinical study in lung cancer.

 

The company’s fifth phase II combination study in lung cancer (non-small cell lung cancer, NSCLC) is called LUNGVAC.

Lung cancer is one of the most common cancers globally and by far the biggest cause of cancer deaths in both men and women. NSCLC accounts for approximately 85% of all lung cancers. The news of the new clinical study comes as we are entering the month of November, the “Lung Cancer Awareness Month”.

For patients with advanced lung cancer

An estimated 850,000 new cases of NSCLC are diagnosed each year, according to Ultimovacs. Most of these cases are metastatic patients, for whom the 5-year survival rate is around 7%.

“We see this new trial as a significant opportunity for Ultimovacs to make a difference to the lives of thousands of patients with advanced lung cancer,” said Carlos de Sousa, CEO of Ultimovacs, in the company’s press release.

Sponsored by Drammen Hospital

The LUNGVAC study will be a multi-center, randomized, open-label trial assessing the safety and efficacy of Ultimovacs vaccine candidate UV1 in combination with the checkpoint inhibitor cancer medicine pembrolizumab versus pembrolizumab alone in NSCLC patients with advanced or metastatic disease.

Checkpoint inhibitors are a type of immunotherapy. They block proteins that stop the immune system from attacking the cancer cells.  

Professor Odd Terje Brustugun will be the principal investigator for the study, which will be sponsored by Drammen Hospital in Norway. The study will enroll approximately 138 patients and will be conducted at 8-10 clinical centres in Norway. The first patient is expected to be treated in the first part of 2022. Data read-out from the trial is anticipated by the end of 2024.

Read more in the company’s press release at Oslo Børs.

A month of good news

This week, Ultimovacs also announced that they had a successful private placement, raising NOK 270 Million in a significantly oversubscribed round.

Last week, Ultimovacs reached a significant milestone by receiving a dual Fast Track designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA Fast Track status is reserved for research programs focused on developing drugs that address severe medical conditions and fill an unmet medical need to accelerate promising treatments to patients with high unmet needs.

About the company

Ultimovacs is developing immune-stimulatory vaccines to treat a broad range of cancers. Ultimovacs’ lead universal cancer vaccine candidate UV1 targets human telomerase (hTERT), present in 85-90% of cancers in all stages of tumor growth. By directing the immune system to hTERT antigens, UV1 drives CD4 helper T cells to the tumor to activate an immune system cascade and increase anti-tumor responses. With a broad Phase II program, Ultimovacs aims to clinically demonstrate UV1’s impact in multiple cancer types in combination with other immunotherapies. Ultimovacs’ second technology approach, based on the proprietary Tetanus-Epitope-Targeting (TET) platform, combines tumor-specific peptides and adjuvant in the same molecule and entered Phase I studies in 2021. For further information, please see www.ultimovacs.com

 

 

Lytix

Lytix Biopharma and UiT with exclusive agreement

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Lytix Biopharma enters into an exclusive license agreement with the Arctic University of Norway (UiT) about drug candidates that combat cancer cells by stimulating the body’s own immune cells.

The Norwegian biotech company and Oslo Cancer Cluster member Lytix Biopharma has developed a new group of promising drug candidates together with a research team at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT). The drug candidates can combat cancer cells by stimulating the body’s own immune cells.

“Over the past year, we have achieved several key milestones with our most advanced drug candidate, LTX-315, and have successfully confirmed the unique potential of our technology platform. Through one of the joint projects with the scientific expertise at UiT, a set of new promising molecules have been discovered. This exclusive license agreement expands our overall product portfolio, which further demonstrates the robustness of our approach to this segment,” says CEO Øystein Rekdal at Lytix Biopharma in a press release from the company.

A broad collaboration

The drug candidates licensed have been developed in a collaboration between UiT and Lytix Biopharma, partly funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the Norwegian Cancer Society. A combined team from UiT, Norce, Oslo University Hospital and Institute Gustave Roussy in Paris have contributed to the project. Lytix Biopharma originally stems from the Arctic University in Tromsø.

This agreement grants Lytix Biopharma all rights to further develop and commercialize this new class of compounds.

Partnership with Aurelius Biotherapeutics

Lytix also forms a strategic partnership with the US-based specialist veterinary medicine company Aurelius Biotherapeutics to expedite the progression of the compounds that seem especially promising and suitable for the veterinary medicine market.

Aurelius Biotherapeutics now initiates further studies on this compound, to validate the initial data, and to refine its target product profile. Aurelius is currently also developing their own lead candidate, which now will be combined with the Lytix drug candidate.

Read more about the new partnerships in the press release from Lytix Biopharma. You can download it here.