Butterly-from Ariana Pharma Website

Our Cambridge Innovation Center colleague Ariana Pharma reports that it has joined the WIN consortium as an official technology partner. Congrats! Here’s the release. 

Paris, France, and Cambridge, Massachusetts USA, 29 October 2014 – Ariana Pharma, developer of innovative clinical data analysis and diagnostic solutions for the healthcare sector, today announced it has joined the WIN Consortium as an official technology partner. The Consortium (Worldwide Innovative Networking in personalized cancer medicine) is a global collaboration of 40 leading organizations whose aim is to develop more effective cancer diagnostics and therapeutics, shorten clinical trial timelines and reduce the overall cost of cancer care.

The new WIN/Ariana partnership is expected to accelerate the translation of personalized medicine discoveries into widely available new standards of care for all cancer patients, leading to significantly improved clinical outcomes and a higher quality of life for cancer patients.

As a technology partner of the WIN Consortium, Ariana will have early access to the latest research, key opinion leaders, leading academic groups and personalized medicine clinical trials. Ariana uses OncoKEM^®, a proprietary clinical decision support platform for personalized medicine, to transform big data into better therapeutic decisions for cancer patients.

Ariana Pharma Founder and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Mohammad Afshar said: “We are delighted to be an official technology partner of the WIN Consortium where we can continue to leverage our expertise in patient stratification, multi-marker diagnostic optimization and data mining to transform complex clinical data into actionable information. Our expanded access to the leading global stakeholders in personalized medicine will allow us to test new hypotheses, to enhance interaction to yield valuable feedback and thus accelerate the development process and commercialisation of these critical new services for the global cancer community.”

“We are delighted to welcome Ariana Pharma in our consortium. Ariana Pharma provides outstanding computational skills enabling the translation of academic projects into commercial tools to support the therapeutic decision for cancer patients,” said Dr. John Mendelsohn, Chairman of the WIN Consortium.

WIN is recognized for pioneering the evolution of next-generation clinical trials, which test personalized treatment selection strategies rather than single drugs. These strategies are driven by algorithms that match targeted therapies or combination therapies to individual tumor biological profiles based on diagnostic analysis of genomic data and other information.

In 2013 the WIN Consortium chose Ariana Pharma to develop and globally commercialize ground-breaking decision support software in WIN’s WINTHER trial, the first state of the art clinical trial in personalized cancer medicine to help clinicians choose the best therapies for cancer patients. Ariana retains exclusive global rights to commercialize software and algorithms validated by the WINTHER clinical trial through Ariana’s OncoKEM^® platform.

About Ariana Pharma

Ariana Pharma develops innovative clinical data analysis and diagnostic testing solutions to help the healthcare sector better adapt patient treatments to individual biological characteristics. Ariana Pharma’s KEM^® technology enables personalization of therapies, improves the efficacy and safety of patient treatment, reduces risks and drug development costs, and accelerates time to market. KEM^® is the only FDA tested technology that systematically explores combinations of biomarkers, producing more effective biomarker signatures for personalized medicine. Founded in 2003 as a spin-off of the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France, the company opened a subsidiary in the United States in 2012.For more information, please visit www.arianapharma.com

About the WIN Consortium

Founded in 2010, WIN is an initiative from the Institut Gustave Roussy (France) and University of Texas MD Anderson cancer center (USA). WIN is unique structurally in that it brings together organizations from academia, business and not-for-profits to focus on translating the latest advances in personalized cancer medicine into the standard of care. WIN is built on the recognition that all stakeholders in personalized cancer therapy must collaborate and share information, in order to effectively bring the latest innovations in personalized cancer care to the patient. WIN is a non-profit organization formed by 40 renowned members: Academic cancer centres (25 centres in 16 countries), companies (Blue Cross Blue Shield, Agilent Technologies, GE Healthcare, Oracle Health Services, Foundation Medicine, Millennium Takeda, AstraZeneca and Pfizer), non-profit organizations such as EORTC, Fondation ARC and Sage Bionetworks. WIN organizes an annual symposium in Paris dedicated to personalized medicine. For further information, please visit www.winconsortium.org  and www.winsymposium.org.

–Anita M Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning pr and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA. {Ariana is not our client]. AMH.

SHANAHAN NAMED VP OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

—One of the newest international companies to expand into Cambridge is Ariana (R)  Pharma–a 2003 spin-out of the Pasteur Institute in Paris.  Its  subsidiary, Ariana Data Intelligence, Inc., located in the Cambridge Innovation Center at 1 Broadway,  will provide novel non-statistical clinical data analysis technology to pharma and the FDA,  Ariana announced today.

The technology,  “Knowledge Extraction and Management Technology (KEM)” is aimed at reducing cost, bias, and risk in clinical trials.

“The US pharma and biotech markets tend  to be early technology adopters and are searching for better data analytics tools to advance personalized medicine using all the new biomarker, genomic, proteomic and metabolomic data now being generated,” said  Dr. Mohammad Afshar, Ariana’s President and CEO.

KEM   “is the only FDA-tested technology that  can simultaneously analyze all these variables and pull out patient responder sub-groups, optimize biomarker signatures and remove bias from clinical trials,” Afshar said.

A “unique” association rules-based (non-statistical) analytical technology, KEM  finds patient responder sub-populations and biomarker signatures that statistical methods are unable to detect, according to Afshar.  KEM thus optimizes clinical trial inclusion/exclusion criteria, thereby lowering the number of patients needed to reach clinical endpoints and saving sponsors both time and cash, and reducing clinical drug development risk.

In conjunction with the opening, Ariana has appointed James M. Shanahan as Vice President  of Business Development.  Shanahan was previously a co-founder and is currently a  board member of SynDevRx, Inc., an oncology-focused biotech company. He was also a co-founder and VP Corporate Development of JAM Technologies, Inc.

Ariana offers something “special and desperately needed “by the pharmaceutical industry, Shanahan said.   “Companies spend tens of millions generating data.  Now, it’s all about making sense of that data.  KEM identifies useful, complex biological relationships that statistics routinely miss.”

More information is available at  http://www.arianapharma.com/  .

–Anita M. Harris