CeMM: Allcyte - a new spin-off company from CeMM provides diagnostics and drug discovery for blood cancers

04 Sept. 2017

Allcyte - a new spin-off company from CeMM provides diagnostics and drug discovery for blood cancers

CeMM today officially announces the start of operation of a new spin-off company, Allcyte, founded by CeMM Director Giulio Superti-Furga, Berend Snijder, now Professor at the ETH Zurich, Gregory Vladimer, and Nikolaus Krall. The team met while Snijder, Vladimer, Krall were postdoctoral fellows in the research group of Giulio Superti-Furga. Allcyte supports pre-clinical drug development and clinical decision making services by helping physicians find the right drug for the right patients, and pharmaceutical companies identify the most promising indications for their drugs and drug candidates. In the era of big-data medicine, Allcyte is built around the “Pharmacoscopy” high-content imaging platform originally developed at CeMM, and clinically validated in collaboration with the Department of Hematology of the Medical University of Vienna. The Pharmacoscopy technology is the basis for a number of academic research collaborations between CeMM and the MedUni Wien, including a life science grant provided by the WWTF that aims to define better personalized medicine for late-stage hematological cancer patients.

As of September 1, Allcyte has entered an important strategic collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim to advance Boehringer Ingelheim’s preclinical oncology drug discovery by using the pharmacoscopy technology. Pharmacoscopy enables the profiling of drug response in primary liquid patient samples with minimal sample requirement, high speed, and with single cell resolution, enabling never-before-quantified phenotypes to drive scientific exploration. The platform can not only measure cell-autonomous drug effects (e.g., specific killing of a particular cell) but is also capable of quantifying the interplay between different cell types in complex human tissues by measuring physical cell-cell interactions in an unprecedented and statistically robust manner. Parts of the technology have recently been published in Vladimer et al Nature Chemical Biology 2017.

The mission of CeMM is to achieve maximum scientific innovation in molecular medicine by performing excellent research. Only the efficient commercialization of CeMM’s proprietary and ideas can lead to the improvement of healthcare. Therefore intellectual property of CeMM already resulted in the founding of new start-up companies (Haplogen, MyeloPro, Allcyte), and into out-licensing of patents or partnerships with industry involving consultancy, know-how, technology transfer.

Allcyte is supported by Austrian Business Agency (AWS) pre-seed and seed grants managed by the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and the Economy, and the Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology, as well as by private investors and industry cooperation.

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