Sonrai Analytics has entered a strategic partnership with Candel Therapeutics to expedite the development of viral immunotherapies for treating cancer leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).

The collaboration will add the cloud-based AI technology of Sonrai to Candel's pipeline.

The approach will aid Candel in combining and assessing clinical trial data, potentially enabling the detection of predictive biomarkers for treatment responses.

Candel will employ Sonrai's AI technology platform Sonrai Discovery to consolidate and examine data types comprising multi-omics [a new approach in which the data sets of different omic groups (molecular processes within an organism) are combined during analysis], imaging and clinical information.

Sonrai Discovery will streamline workflows and visualisations, expediting the process of biomarker discovery, management and analysis by shortlisting and reporting biomarkers.

The platform's ability to aid in the examination and sharing of multi-omics data will permit Candel's researchers to progress in the development of cancer treatments by overcoming data silos and preventing duplicated efforts.

Sonrai Analytics CEO and founder professor Darragh McArt stated: “We are committed to bringing innovation through AI to our partners developing groundbreaking therapeutics to save patients’ lives. The ability to integrate multi-omics data with imaging data is a key innovation in the Sonrai platform, which allows drug developers to maximise outputs from their data and gain new insights.”

Sonrai's AI platform will be instrumental in examining multi-omics data from ongoing clinical trials targeting lung and pancreatic cancer.

The integrated analysis will include possible interactions between baseline participant characteristics, post-treatment biological changes and clinical outcomes, offering a comprehensive assessment of the response to Candel’s investigational medicines.

Candel Therapeutics chief scientific officer Francesca Barone stated: “At Candel, we have previously implemented AI in our enLIGHTENTM Discovery Platform. By partnering with Sonrai, we are able to expand the scope of computational biology and AI to our clinical data. 

“Being able to integrate multi-omics data with imaging and clinical data allows us to accelerate our goal to treat cancer patients with precision.”