Avacta Therapeutics has entered a strategic collaboration with Tempus AI to advance the development of drugs in oncology.

Avacta will gain access to Tempus' extensive multimodal datasets, which include primary samples of tumours and data from more than 200,000 patients across a range of cancer types.

The collaboration will leverage the clinical data to explore the tumour microenvironment biology and fibroblast activation protein (FAP) activity, which are fundamental to Avacta's pre|CISION technology.

The pre|CISION platform is a warhead delivery system that targets tumour-specific protease to concentrate potent treatments within the tumour microenvironment, reducing the impact on healthy tissues.

Avacta CEO Christina Coughlin stated: “Our pipeline of pre|CISIONoncology programmes will benefit greatly from an extensive understanding of the tumour microenvironment, FAP biology and both high and low-FAP expression across solid tumour settings.

“The Tempus AI real-world database and industry-leading AI capabilities will enable us to better assess the specific patient population most likely to respond to our pre|CISION therapies, enabling faster, smarter clinical development with the highest probability of success.”

The company has also recently expanded its platform with two new preclinical programmes: AVA6103 and AVA7100.

AVA6103 is a peptide drug conjugate that utilises exatecan, a topoisomerase I inhibitor to deliver targeted anti-tumour effects.

The first-in-class Affimer drug conjugate AVA7100 is designed to target cancers with varying FAP expression levels.

Tempus AI chief scientific officer Kate Sasser stated: “Tempus was created to build one of the world’s largest libraries of multimodal data and an operating system to make those data accessible and useful.

“This collaboration with Avacta is another example of our execution of that vision, and we are thrilled to partner with Avacta in support of their efforts to bring game-changing new therapies to patients in need.”

The insights gained from the collaboration with Tempus are expected to enhance the reach of Avacta's pre|CISION platform by identifying broader patient populations for its clinical programmes.

Computational biology experts from Tempus will work alongside the Avacta team to analyse the data, potentially accelerating the development of effective cancer treatments.

In September 2024, Tempus AI expanded its collaboration with Takeda to enhance oncology research and development.