NEW YORK and BOSTON, Aug. 16, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HiberCell, a clinical stage biotechnology company developing therapeutics to treat cancer relapse and metastasis, announced today the acquisition of Genuity Science, Inc., a life science technology company that provides world-leading genomics and multi-omic analytics bolstered by an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platform to illuminate the underlying cause of cancer and other diseases. Together, the combined company will strategically apply AI/ML to accelerate and advance its pipeline with a focus on overcoming the foundational barriers that prevent patients from living longer, cancer-free lives. The stock acquisition of the Genuity Science business provides HiberCell with approximately $100 million in cash, as well as the existing partnership agreements with Ionis and AbbVie. It is expected that future earnouts of these partnerships will support HiberCell’s growth as a clinical stage biotechnology company.
Under the terms of the agreement, Genuity Science, Inc., and its two wholly owned subsidiaries, Genuity Science (Iceland) ehf and Genuity Science (Ireland) Limited, will become a wholly owned subsidiary of HiberCell. This acquisition builds on HiberCell’s translational oncology efforts by adding a world-leading human genomics analytic technology and computational platform, along with high-quality genomic, multi-omic, and deeply characterized phenotype datasets in cancer, cardiometabolic, autoimmune, and neurological disorders. HiberCell will also expand its executive leadership team with the addition of Tom Chittenden as Chief Technology Officer, Jeff Gulcher as Chief Scientific Officer of Genomics, and Hákon Guðbjartsson as Chief Informatics Officer. These important additions bolster HiberCell’s leadership team, which has decades of experience in oncology drug discovery and development.
“Our therapeutic programs have been identified through mechanistic insight into the role of the adaptive stress phenotype in cancer patients,” said Alan Rigby, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of HiberCell. “Genuity’s AI/ML platform, which has successfully identified and validated novel molecular pathways in disease initiation and progression, is well positioned to further our understanding of the stress phenotype and its role in cancer progression.”
The combined company brings together powerful tools that will enhance the company’s probability of clinical success through an in-depth analysis of clinical samples, a validation of pharmacodynamic biomarkers, and a deeper understanding of the responsive phenotype in patients. The combined company will also leverage the multi-omic AI/ML capabilities to exhaustively compare primary tumor biology with paired metastatic lesions to better identify the targets and mechanisms that drive metastatic disease.
“We believe pairing HiberCell’s success in advancing differentiated oncology medicines into the clinic with Genuity’s advanced technologies in genomic research and one-of-a-kind AI/ML platform will break new ground for what is possible in cancer drug discovery,” said Hannes Smarason, current CEO and Co-Founder of Genuity Science.
“Since forming HiberCell, we have been building our clinical pipeline and research programs using proprietary datasets,” said Rigby. “The integration of Genuity’s AI/ML tools uniquely positions HiberCell at the forefront of computational technology and drug development. We believe this acquisition jump starts a deeper mechanistic understanding of the relationship between the adaptive stress phenotype and cancer, while simultaneously allowing us to identify novel precision oncology targets associated with this biology. Applying these computational capabilities to our existing proprietary clinical dataset and material from treatment resistant, relapse, and metastatic disease cohorts will further guide our mechanistic insight of the stress phenotype and its complex role in cancer.”
For more information about HiberCell’s pipeline, visit the website at www.HiberCell.com
About HiberCell
HiberCell is a clinical stage biotechnology company dedicated to the advancement of novel therapeutic molecules that overcome the foundational molecular barriers that prevent patients from living longer, cancer-free lives. HiberCell’s approach utilizes the AI/ML to integrate both the genomic and phenotypic profiles of a patient’s cancer to generate deep insights that connect these data to clinical outcomes to identify the causal features that can be targeted with our novel therapies that address the most common cause of cancer mortality: resistance, relapse and metastasis. To that end, HiberCell is developing therapeutics that that stimulate innate immune activation to reprogram an immunosuppressive tumor immune microenvironment and modulate the omnipresent stress-mediated adaptive response that is essential in cancer cell survival.
Contacts
Investor Contact:
Westwicke, an ICR Company
Stephanie Carrington
stephanie.carrington@westwicke.com
646-277-1282
Media Contact:
Westwicke, an ICR Company
Terri Clevenger
terri.clevenger@westwicke.com
203-856-4326
