Global Excellence 2019

8 Acquisition International - Global Excellence 2019 Oct19340 Issue 1 2020 Conventionally, data mining in biomedicine in the ‘omics’ era refers to a bioinformatics approach that combines key concepts of biology with advanced computer tools or statistical methods that are primarily used to discover, select and prioritize targets. 4HF Biotec is one of the rare companies that has established a novel data mining platform by unifying multiple sources of data for drug discovery in cancer. Winning the award for Germany’s Most Innovative Cancer Data Analytics Company 2019, we profiled this exciting organization to discover more. rof. Dr. Heinz-Herbert Fiebig founded 4HF Biotec in June 2015 following the acquisition of his previously founded organization, Oncotest, by Charles River Laboratories International. In the 1980s, by his pioneering work in the field of cancer research at the University Medical Center Freiburg, his team demonstrated the closest resemblance of the Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models with human cancer and postulated their suitability as best models for cancer drug testing. He founded Oncotest GmbH in the year 1993. The company specialized in in vivo pharmacology services, leveraging an extensive collection of more than 400 patient-derived xenografts (PDX) tumor models, as well as a full range of in vitro assays using both commercially available and proprietary PDX- derived cell lines. After 22 years, in the year 2015, Oncotest GmbH was acquired by Charles River Laboratories International. Driven by his motivation in exploring further into Cancer Drug Discovery and putting forward his decades-long research-derived data, he established 4HF Biotec. Traditionally, knowledge-based hypothesis-driven studies are the keyways for cancer therapeutic discoveries. Recently, in the ‘omics’ era, the advancement of the big data resources, catalyzed by breakthroughs in high-throughput technologies, has resulted in a paradigm shift in cancer therapeutic research. The combination of robust computational methods and genomics data has led to several successful clinical applications. However, a prerequisite to drug discovery decisions is the optimization of multiple parameters. Optimally connecting these parameters requires integrative information across multiple sources. However, it is a challenging and complex task to integrate information from disparate domains and the availability of a curated, connected, correlated and aligned platform is sparse. Specializing in Bioinformatics and Datamining, 4HF Biotec has curated, connected, aligned and correlated a wide assembly of Changing Perception On Collecting Information P cancer-related databases that will offer an unprecedented amount of information. The research team at 4HF has conducted a deeper data analysis, first analyzing the data from each platform separately and then combining them in an integrated cross-platform analysis. The “Using their fully functional data mining software, 4HF can run various programs to identify new small molecules that could be used in cancer treatments in the future.”