ORLANDO, FL, April 04, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CEOLive.TV, a news organization that highlights leading CEOs, companies, and industry experts for investors, today released a video interview with Dr. Carl Schwartz, CEO of Precision Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:AIPT), formerly Skyline Medical Inc (NASDAQ:SKLN).
As Dr. Schwartz explained to CEOLive.TV’s Mike Elliott, Precision Therapeutics has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of cancer through personalized medicine, because it is developing a better way to grow and test human tumors outside the body. That makes it possible to test cocktails of drugs against individual tumors to find the right drug combination for fighting an individual’s unique cancer. “Our ability to replicate tumors that react like they were still in the body gives us a leg up in this research,” said Dr. Schwartz.
Why is this so important? Cancer is actually many thousands of different diseases, each with different underlying DNA mutations. That’s why drugs that are effective against one person’s ovarian cancer may fail utterly against another’s. Until now, “dealing with tumors can often be hit or miss,” explained Schwartz. Not only do doctors usually not know how to precisely target drugs to use for each individual patient’s tumor mutations, pharmaceutical companies face a difficult challenge developing and testing new drugs. While companies are trying to grow human tumors in mice for testing, mice are not humans, so the tests often lead to dead ends. And though it’s possible to grow tumor cells in petri dishes, they rarely behave like actual cancers.
Precision Therapeutics is focused on solving this key industry problem. Through its wholly subsidiary, TumorGenesis, it has recently licensed technology from CellBridge, SyntArray, and 48Hour Discovery that make it possible to take cancer cells from a patient’s tumor and grow them on a 3D scaffold in a way that more precisely mimics tumor growth in the body. Once this approach is validated, and through the partnership with Helomics, drugs can be tested on these tumors to see what kills the cancer cells, and that information can be sent to the patients’ doctors. Because we expect that cancer cells grown this way will react just like tumors in the body, “the information going back to the physician will be much more precise,” Dr. Schwartz told CEOLive.
In addition the TumorGenesis approach will be used in conjunction with Pharma companies for the discovery of new cancer therapies. Through the partnership with Helomics, patient tumors, (with appropriate consent), grown using the TumorGenesis approach can be used as a high throughput platform to test novel drugs. This information will be added to the Helomics D-CHIP AI platform, which already has data on the drug response profiles of over 149,000 tumors, to build a more comprehensive picture of the drug response of the tumor and its DNA mutations. In this way Pharma companies can rapidly screen thousands of potential new drug candidates to develop new more precisely targeted therapies.
As a result, Precision Therapeutics is poised to become a leader in the rapidly expanding field of personalized medicine. “It is a great field with tremendous growth potential,” said Dr. Schwartz. “We think we will be premier in this field.”
Forward Looking Statements
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