A translational research team led by the National University of Singapore (NUS) has harnessed CURATE.AI, a powerful artificial intelligence platform, to successfully treat a patient with advanced cancer, completely halting disease progression, said a statement on Friday.
According to the official statement released by NSU, in this clinical study, a patient with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (MCRPC) was given a novel drug combination consisting of investigational drug ZEN-3694 and enzalutamide, an approved prostate cancer drug. The research team successfully utilised CURATE.AI to continuously identify the optimal doses of each drug to result in a durable response, allowing the patient to resume a completely normal and active lifestyle.
With this achievement, the CURATE.AI team now expects to broadly deploy the platform for the prevention of transplant rejection, adult and paediatric cancers, cardiovascular medicine, diabetes management, infectious diseases, and many other applications.
Professor Dean Ho, Director of the Singapore Institute for Neurotechnology (SINAPSE) at NUS, who led the study, said in the statement, “Dynamic dosing in cancer therapy is not commonly used. In fact, drug dosing changes in oncology are typically performed only to reduce toxicity. CURATE.AI uniquely modifies drug dosing to increase efficacy. Our clinical study has shown that dosing can profoundly affect the efficacy and safety of the treatment. A patient’s clinical profile changes over time. The unique ability for CURATE.AI to rapidly identify the drug doses that result in the best possible treatment outcomes allows for actionable, and perpetually optimised personalised medicine.”
Combination Therapy
Using the combination therapy approach, multiple drugs are used to attack the processes that support cancer growth. A primary objective when designing combination therapies is to achieve drug synergy, where the drugs work together to substantially improve efficacy. While combination therapy has generally improved treatment outcomes such as overall survival for many cancers, it is predominantly given at both fixed as well as high doses.
Harnessing AI To Optimise Combination Therapy
To overcome the challenges of conventional combination therapy, the NUS team developed the CURATE.AI platform, which uses the patient’s own clinical data — such as their drug doses and corresponding changes to tumour sizes or levels of cancer biomarkers in the blood — to calibrate her/his unique response to treatment. This calibration is then used to create an individualised CURATE.AI profile, or map, that identifies the drug doses which enable the best possible treatment outcome at any given point in time.
“No two patients’ profiles are alike, and as a patient’s body and cancer itself evolve during treatment, the CURATE.AI profile evolves as well, enabling the clinical and engineering teams to optimise care for the entire duration of treatment, an unprecedented advance for combination therapy,” Prof Ho explained.
More Clinical Trials
CURATE.AI is applicable to all diseases and all patients, and a first generation of the platform was previously validated in the clinic for single drug optimisation in post-transplant immunosuppression. This new study demonstrates that CURATE.AI can optimise multi-drug regimens.
Multiple clinical trials using CURATE.AI-guided combination therapy for oncology and additional applications such as post-transplant immunosuppression are underway. In addition, patient recruitment for additional oncology trials in Singapore has been approved.
