The Opportunity in the Marketplace

Progress in genomics and proteomics technologies over the past decade has brought personalized medicine to the forefront of medical care.  Much research has focused on the identification of unique biomarkers for prognostics and diagnostics. With these biomarkers, the individual molecular signature of a patient can be analyzed to inform treatment decisions that yield enhanced outcomes and reduced suffering.

However, from a systems biology perspective, prognosis or diagnosis are often in fact better correlated with the network relationships among several gene or protein-based biomarkers in one or more pathways, creating the opportunity to develop new or improved medical tools based on systemic analyses.

The Solution Provided by Genomics

Dynemo is a software application based on dynamic protein interaction networks that can accurately predict  cancer survival.  This prognostic tool has the potential to provide valuable personalized analysis for cancer patients to help inform treatment decisions. Enhanced predictive accuracy could, for example, reduce the financial burden of unnecessary tests or treatments and improve quality-of-life for thousands of cancer patients.

This network interaction-based technology looks at resected tumour slices and computationally analyzes the input with a revolutionary algorithm. Dynemo can predict breast cancer survival with over 80% accuracy when combined with histopathology data , and continued development efforts will augment the predictive power of the test.

Dynemo also has the potential for use in clinical efficacy studies to assess drug-responsiveness and define the mechanism of action.  Trial sponsors could zone in on a unique subpopulation of drug effectiveness, or define drug combination regimens that may prove useful to the patient.

The Company

Dynemo Biosystems was founded by researchers at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, based on a clinical service model.  Dynemo has attracted widespread, international interest since it was first announced.

The Scientists

Dynemo was developed in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Wrana, a Senior Investigator at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, a Mary Janigan Research Chair in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, and an International Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  Other key members of the Dynemo Biosystems team are Ian Taylor, a graduate student in Dr. Wrana’s lab, who played a key role in development of the algorithm and Ben Rogers, Director of Business Development for Dynemo. 

Key collaborators and leaders in the Dynactome Project – a large-scale effort to elucidate protein-protein interaction networks of which Dynemo is a key outcome - are the laboratories of Dr. Anthony Pawson, a 2008 Kyoto Prize winner, and a Senior Investigator at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute and Dr. Shawn Li, an Associate Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Paediatrics at the University of Western Ontario and a Scientist of the National Cancer Institute of Canada.

The Funding

These research endeavors are currently supported by Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation, Genome Canada through the Ontario Genomics Institute and other funding partners in Canada and internationally.

Learn More

Learn more about Dynemo Biosystems here.

Learn more about the project here and about resources associated with this and other large-scale genomics projects here.

Learn more about the Ontario Genomics Institute here.

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