GI Innovation, Inc.

Qure.ai nets $65M for foundational AI Qure.ai has raised $65 million in a Series D funding round led by Lightspeed and 360 ONE Asset. The company said it will use its fresh funds to invest more in foundational AI models, as well as acquire complementary startups in medical technology. It will also be used to accelerate its expansion in the United States and other markets. Early this year, the Mumbai-based company obtained two major clearances from the United States Food and Drug Administration: a breakthrough device designation for its tuberculosis screening AI solution, qSpot-TB, and a 510(k) clearance for the lung nodule on the qXR AI-powered chest X-ray software. Mediwhale bags $12M to seek US FDA approval South Korean health diagnostics firm Mediwhale has scored $12 million in a Series A2 funding round led by the Korea Development Bank. The company claims to offer the world's first retina-based solution – called Reti-CVD – that uses AI to assess cardiovascular disease risk. It plans to use its new funds to pursue a US FDA approval for Reti-CVD. The software was reportedly rolled out across the Yonsei University Health System early this year. "We are determined to secure FDA De Novo approval by 2025, with plans to launch our product in the United States shortly thereafter," CEO Kevin Choi said in a statement. Besides securing a regulatory clearance, Mediwhale also seeks to improve its AI further and develop new solutions to predict chronic kidney disease risk. Mediwhale last raised $2 million in a pre-Series A funding round in 2021 and $9 million in a Series A round in 2023. Huawei launches medical imaging AI Huawei recently unveiled a new AI-powered solution for analysing medical images. Called "Medical Technology Digitalization 2.0," the technology enables smart segmentation, detection, and quantitative analysis of medical images using AI with up to 98% accuracy. Huawei claims the solution can shorten disease diagnosis time by 40%, although it has not specified which disease. Additionally, the AI solution can also be applied to ultrasound devices running on the OpenHarmony operating system. The Chinese tech giant worked with several local medical technology companies, including MED Imaging AI, Wanxiang, Beijing DeepWise, and KFBIO, to develop the solution, which has been implemented in such major projects as the Fourth People's Hospital in Shenyang, capital of China’s northeast Liaoning Province. Korean pharma turns to AI for new drug discovery Korean pharmaceutical company GI Innovation is pursuing the application of AI for new drug development. It recently signed a memorandum of understanding with local company i-Divine to develop its core cancer drug pipelines and utilise the latter's AI solution to discover new cancer therapy targets. i-Divine's AI is based on a large language model trained on over a billion patents, papers, and real-time biological data sourced globally. It was previously utilised to analyse the success potential of 16,000 new drug substances, including one of GI Innovation's anti-cancer drug pipelines. MediBuddy adopts Philips' predictive heart AI MediBuddy in India is integrating Philips' heart health monitoring platform into its mobile health application. The AI-based longitudinal triaging solution called HeartPrint tracks and assesses key biomarkers from a person's finger when scanned through their smartphone's camera. These include cardiovascular age, diabetes risk, OSA risk, cardio-respiratory fitness index, heart rate analysis, cardiac index, blood pressure variability, and stress disorder prediction. The AI solution also analyses patterns indicating a person's risk of developing heart disease, overall health deterioration, heart resilience, and short and long-term changes in cardiac function.

SEOUL, South Korea--( BUSINESS WIRE )--The South Korean biotech company GI Innovation announced today that it has signed a clinical trial collaboration and supply agreement with MSD (a tradename of Merck& Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA) to evaluate the combination of GI-102 and MSD’s anti-PD-1 therapy, KEYTRUDA® (pembrolizumab) in patients with immunotherapy-resistant liver cancer, melanoma, and renal cell carcinoma. This agreement marks GI Innovation’s second clinical trial collaboration with MSD, following a previous collaboration for GI-101A. The Phase 2 clinical trial including GI-102 in combination with KEYTRUDA will enroll patients with resistance or non-response to immuno-oncology treatments, leaving them with no further treatment options. GI Innovation is focused on three indications with significant market potential and potential likelihood of success: metastatic liver cancer, melanoma, and renal cell carcinoma. The company has already demonstrated strong anti-cancer efficacy with a 42.9% overall response rate (ORR) in a monotherapy trial of GI-102 in melanoma patients who failed to respond to standard-of-care treatment (3 partial responses out of 7 patients). Complete tumor regression was previously observed in 60% of mice treated with GI-102 monotherapy in a preclinical liver cancer model. Fourteen hospitals in South Korea and world-renowned sites in the U.S. have agreed to join the trial, including the Mayo Clinic (campuses in Rochester, Florida, and Arizona), Cleveland Clinic and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In South Korea, the trial will take place at leading hospitals including Samsung Medical Center, Asan Medical Center, Seoul National University Hospital, Severance Hospital of Yonsei University, and St. Vincent’s Hospital. "We are pleased to enter into another clinical trial collaboration and supply agreement with MSD, a world leader in immuno-oncology. We aim to maximize the therapeutic value of GI-102 by combining it with KEYTRUDA, MSD’s anti-PD-1 therapy”, said Dr Myung-Ho Jang, GI Innovation’s Chief Scientific Officer. KEYTRUDA® is a registered trademark of Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway NJ, USA.

With $3.5 million in funding from the GI Research Foundation, a team at the MD Anderson Cancer Center explores a one-two punch to combat BRAF-mutated colorectal cancer and its "dismal prognosis." CHICAGO, IL / ACCESSWIRE / December 13, 2023 / Many cancers caused by the mutation of the BRAF gene respond well to a class of immunotherapies known as BRAF-inhibitors. BRAF-mutated colorectal cancer, however, almost never does. Doctors have known this for years, but they are yet to find a treatment that works well for most patients. "BRAF-inhibitors provide very different clinical outcomes," said Dr. Scott Kopetz, a Professor and Associate Vice President for Translational Integration at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. "They work amazingly well in melanoma, for example, but are less effective in colorectal cancer." "BRAF [in colorectal cancer] is that odd uncle who doesn't behave like the rest of the family. The black sheep. Is he even related? The usual rules don't apply." Dr. Kopetz and his team's most recent studies of this black sheep are now moving from research in mice to clinical trials in humans. These trials were approved by the National Cancer Institute in October and will launch in early 2024. The GI Research Foundation helped support the work with mice models, along with several other aspects of the team's BRAF-related research. The $3.5 million grant is part of the foundation's massive CA CURE initiative. "Last year, we were able to deliver more than $18 million to researchers across the country to improve diagnostics and develop immunotherapies and personalized vaccines in gastrointestinal cancers through CA CURE," said Katie Chudnovsky, chair of the GI Research Foundation's Board of Directors. "Patients need treatments like those being developed by Dr. Kopetz - so very urgently - and we are thrilled to see this team's work moving to clinical trials so quickly." BRAF-mutated colorectal cancer comes with a "dismal prognosis," according to research in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, and the median patient survives less than a year. This new form of treatment for BRAF-mutated colorectal cancer relies on what Kopetz called a "two-hit hypothesis." That is, these cancers are caused by the combination of mutations in the BRAF gene and epigenetic dysregulation. Epigenetic dysregulation refers to the fact that behaviors and environment can impact how a person's genes behave. Here, researchers have found that a mutation to the BRAF gene changes the production of proteins that cause healthy cells to grow into cancerous tumors. Other forms of BRAF-mutated cancer respond well to BRAF-inhibitor immunotherapy that can halt the production of those proteins. In BRAF-mutated colorectal cancer, however, another piece of DNA is unable to express itself entirely. Those genes typically create natural tumor suppressors that fight early cancer growth. Carbon molecules called methyl groups attach themselves to the DNA and prevent the DNA from building cancer-suppressing proteins. That "methylation" is the epigenetic dysregulation in this case, likely caused by inflammation, diet, or external environmental factors. If doctors can stop the proteins that cause cancer and stop the bromodomains, they might be able to produce a one-two punch to combat their double hit hypothesis. The treatment would slow BRAF-mutated colorectal cancer growth and encourage natural cancer suppressors. That idea will be tested in the human trials that were recently approved by the National Cancer Institute. A BRAF-inhibitor, an EGFR-inhibitor, and a bromodomain-inhibitor will be administered to patients. This combined treatment was developed by Kopetz and his colleague Dr. Kunal Rai, an Associate Professor of Genomic Medicine at MD Anderson. The research moved from the GI Research Foundation-funded mouse models to human trials exceptionally quickly, according to Kopetz. "It's rare for the pieces to come together like this," he said. "Lots of times, this would be two years of work to get the human trials up and running. But we were able to show how clearly this approach worked in multiple mouse models and that really sped things up." Other funding from the GI Research Foundation will help speed things up even further. "The new technologies and techniques that Dr. Kopetz and his team are exploring will give them the ability to innovate that much faster. It provides the entire community with the means to gather high-quality data more quickly and get it into trials and ultimately into the clinic," said Dr. David Rubin. Rubin is the Joseph B. Kirsner Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Section of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at University of Chicago Medicine. He is also GI Research Foundation's Senior Scientific Advisor. "The GI Research Foundation has a legacy of funding high risk-high reward and innovative science, and doing so efficiently and extraordinarily effectively. Kopetz and his colleagues were recipients of a dedicated campaign that we launched in 2022 to tackle the most difficult challenges of colorectal cancer." "Support from the GI Research Foundation allows us to accelerate our work and try some out of the box stuff," Kopetz said. "We have amazing animal models, but there's no substitute for understanding cancer and treatments with the patients themselves. We want to develop the tools we need so we can learn as much as possible from them and help them as much and as quickly as we can." About the GI Research Foundation The GI Research Foundation was founded in 1961 by grateful patients and friends of the late Dr. Joseph B. Kirsner, a pioneer in gastroenterology who devoted his life to medicine, teaching, and patient care. Today, the University of Chicago Medicine's Digestive Diseases Center, which is supported by the foundation, is internationally recognized for research-driven medicine and its team of highly specialized physicians. For more information, see: About the University of Chicago Digestive Diseases Center The Digestive Diseases Center at the University of Chicago Medicine is a collaborative, multidisciplinary network of physicians, researchers and affiliated health professionals who share a legacy of innovation and a common purpose: to improve the lives of patients who suffer from digestive diseases. For more information, see: Contact Information: Jackie Casey Executive Director jcasey@girf.org 312-332-1350 SOURCE: GI Research Foundation View the original press release on accesswire.com