Alacris Theranostics

Alacris Theranostics GmbH
Privately held
Industry Biotechnology
Founded 2008
Headquarters Fabeckstraße 60-62, Berlin 14195 Germany
Key people
 Hans Lehrach, George Church, Bernhard Hermann (Founders), Bodo Lange (CEO)
Website www.alacris.de

Alacris Theranostics GmbH (Alacris) is a private life science company, located in Berlin, Germany, focused on developing new approaches in personalized medicine for cancer patient diagnosis, treatment and drug stratification.

The company was founded in 2008 by Hans Lehrach of Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and George M. Church of Harvard who had known each other since the 1980s, and Bernhard Hermann, one of Lehrach's students. Lehrach had previously founded Sequana Therapeutics (eventually bought by Celera) and GPC Biotech, which succeeded in becoming publicly traded and getting a drug through clinical trials and submitted to the FDA for approval; however the FDA rejected the drug, leading the company to collapse. Church had founded 8 companies.[1]

Alacris was founded to commercialize methods to model biological systems developed by the founders. The models can be used in personalized medicine to understand how the mutations in a person's cancer will drive development of their disease, or how that person might respond to a specific drug. The models could also be used in drug discovery efforts to better understand the best use for a drug, or how modulating a target might cause toxicity or other unexpected effects; it could also be used in drug development to select or exclude subjects for clinical trials, thus saving time and money.[1] Alacris also offers whole genome sequencing services using equipment from Pacific Biosciences and Illumina, both to feed data into its own models, and in collaboration with companies that do their own analyses on the resulting data.[1][2]

In 2011 Alacris accepted an investment from Qiagen and in exchange offered Qiagen an exclusive option to license cancer biomarkers discovered by Alacris, for Qiagen to incorporate into the companion diagnostic products offered by Qiagen, as well in Qiagen's arrangements with pharmaceutical companies to create and develop new companion diagnostics for drug candidates in those companies' pipelines.[3] Qiagen was Alacris' first investor; at that point Alacris was still a virtual company.[4] Alacris has received funding via grants from the European Union, including under the Seventh Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, the Innovative Medicines Initiative, the European Fund for Regional Investment, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and from the Investitionsbank Berlin.[5]

In 2012 Alacris and GlaxoSmithKline began a collaboration to explore activity of a lead compound that GSK wanted to refine and develop for cancer; GSK provided Alacris data from its own preclinical work and Alacris was meant to provide guidance, based on its models, of potential indications and further experiments for GSK to conduct.[6] By 2015, Alacris had signed similar deals with some small biotech companies, and had expanded beyond cancer with a program in bone disease.[7]

In 2015 Alacris won the German Innovation Award in the category of small and medium entities; these awards were created in 2010 by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, the business magazine WirtschaftsWoche and the companies Accenture, EnBW, and Evonik2015.[8]

References

  1. 1 2 3 By Kevin Davies for Bio-IT World. May 19, 2009 Hans Lehrach’s Predictive Biology Philosophy
  2. ↑ Alacris listing in AllSeq Page accessed April 4, 2016
  3. ↑ Turna Ray for GenomeWeb Jan 12, 2011 Biomarker Deal with Alacris Boosts Qiagen's Rx/Dx Capabilities
  4. ↑ Staff, Biotechnologie.de. January 27, 2011. https://www.biotechnologie.de/BIO/Navigation/EN/Funding/foerderbeispiele,did=121912.html Qiagen invests in cancer genome startup]
  5. ↑ Alacris Investors Page Page accessed April 4, 2016]
  6. ↑ Staff, GenomeWeb. Nov 14, 2012 Alacris, GSK Ink Cancer Drug Stratification Deal
  7. ↑ Madeleine Armstrong for EPVantage. August 03, 2015 Interview – Alacris eager to put drug development model into practice
  8. ↑ Germany Trade and Invest News in Brief, January 2016
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