H3 Biomedicine Announces Strategic Collaboration with Sage Bionetworks to Advance Cancer-Genomics Research

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- H3 Biomedicine Inc., a biopharmaceutical company specializing in the discovery and development of oncology treatments, announced today that it has forged a partnership with Sage Bionetworks to jointly develop software platforms that advance critical components of H3's cancer genomics research. Sage will pair its advanced predictive modeling capabilities and collaboration platform with H3's assimilation of genomic and pharmacology data to identify and predict associations between specific human genomic alterations and pharmacological drug responses. As part of an ongoing commitment to an open data-sharing environment, H3 Biomedicine and Sage Bionetworks intend to make the data and tools resulting from this partnership freely accessible to other organizations pursuing cancer research.

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"Our partnership with Sage is symbiotic on several fronts: we are able to bring together our technical expertise to advance critical needs in cancer genomic research, and we share a dedication to the philosophy of open access," stated Markus Warmuth, M.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of H3 Biomedicine. "Unfortunately, there is no shortage of urgent needs in cancer treatment. We hope that making our collaborative results publicly accessible will advance the field of translational research in oncology, ultimately bringing more personalized medicines to patients with many types of cancers, especially those for whom there are limited effective treatment options."

Translating data from the cancer genome into potential therapeutic drugs is largely dependent on the systematic genetic and pharmacological profiling of the increasingly large collection of preclinical cancer genomic models. The H3/Sage partnership aims to develop a robust analytical pipeline of pharmaco-genomic profiling data, which is required to efficiently verify and identify drug response biomarkers. These can be used to determine patients for whom a particular drug may have the largest likelihood for positive therapeutic results, an important step to bring "personalized medicine" to cancer patients.  

Dr. Stephen Friend, President and Founder of Sage Bionetworks, remarked, "H3 is a visionary company. While H3's focus on deep interrogations of biology and commitment to open data-sharing is unusual in the biotech world, we believe it will be trendsetting. Sage's fully curated, open-compute platform is nicely positioned to host H3's drug response and cancer genomic data, and the results of this collaboration hold potentially enormous benefits for the cancer research community as a whole."

About H3 Biomedicine Inc.
H3 Biomedicine is a biopharmaceutical company specializing in the discovery and development of oncology treatments. Using modern synthetic chemistry, chemical biology and human genetics, the company seeks to bring the next generation of cancer treatments to market with the goal of improving the lives of patients. H3 Biomedicine is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit http://www.H3biomedicine.com for more information.

About Sage Bionetworks
Sage Bionetworks was formed as a strategic nonprofit research organization with a mission to coordinate and link academic and commercial biomedical researchers through a Commons that represents a new paradigm for genomics intellectual property, researcher cooperation, and contributor-evolved resources. It is located on the campus of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington and is supported through a portfolio of philanthropic donations, competitive research grants, and commercial partnerships. More information is available at http://sagebase.org/.

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SOURCE H3 Biomedicine Inc.