Speaker: Xiaole Shirley Liu, Ph.D. Co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics, Professor of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard University (-2022）

Time: 15:00-16:00 p.m., November 20, 2023, GMT+8

Venue: Deng Youcai Academic Hall, School of Life Sciences, PKU 

Abstract: 

Despite the exciting clinical benefits of immune checkpoint inhibitors, only a minority of cancer patients respond to treatment. Addressing resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors is an urgent unmet need and requires novel approaches for target identification and drug discovery.

GV20 Therapeutics adopts an interdisciplinary approach integrating functional genomics, big data AI, and cancer immunology for cancer target identification and drug discovery. Our platform computationally extracts antibodies from large cohorts of patient tumor RNA-seq profiles and uses AI to pair targets and corresponding antibodies in silico, de novo with speed and scale. We then leverage in-house and public functional genomics and proteomics data to de-risk the AI-identified targets from patient tumors and provide insights on target function before we conduct systematic in vitro and in vivo validation experiments. We used this approach to discover our lead program, GV20-0251, which is a first-in-class monoclonal antibody against a novel immune checkpoint IGSF8. In multiple syngeneic tumor models, anti-IGSF8 antibody has single-agent efficacy and is synergistic with anti-PD1 in controlling tumor growth, and the safety of GV20-0251 is currently being tested in the clinic. Our efforts represent the beginning of rationally combining genomics and AI to unlock the hidden information from patient tumors to develop cancer therapeutics.


Source: School of Life Sciences, PKU