Mitra Biotech Pvt Ltd., a translational biology company, focuses on enabling personalized cancer care and rational drug development. The company’s technology enables physicians to make an informed treatment decision for a cancer patient by determining optimal drug combination; and rational drug development by identifying driver pathways/mutations. It offers CANScript, a multidimensional laboratory based screening platform that enables physicians to select the optimal drug combination for a cancer patient. The company’s CANScript test is offered through various hospitals in India and the United States.
Oncoprint, which analyses – in just seven days – a range of drugs to arrive at the right fit for a cancer patient.
Mitra Biotech’s technology of arriving at a suitable drug is different from approaches of many other scientists and companies in the segment. Some companies are focusing on what is called a ‘biomarker-based’ approach to figure out the likelihood of response to a particular treatment. Biomarkers are substances found in the blood that help determine a disease. Biomarkers are better suited to find out which drugs may not work in a group of patients rather than trying to predict which ones may work best on a patient.
Some companies, such as US-based Champions Oncology, use the ‘xenograft mouse-based’ diagnostic model to determine personalised cancer treatment – the human tumour is transplanted in mice where it is allowed to grow and then tested with different drugs. The xenograft model, asserts Majumdar, has its limitations since it takes three to six months for the tumour to grow inside the mice and by then the similarity with the human tumour may be lost. And not all human tumours grow in mice.
Mitra’s technology is based on a real-time experiment. The company cultures the cancer tumour in an incubator, giving it the same micro-environment on a laboratory plate it would have inside the body. Drugs are then introduced into the tumour and each of them tested for the response. An algorithm collates all the data, compares the drugs and ranks them based on the suitability for a particular patient.