Pangea Biomed Appoints Ezra Cohen to Chairman of its Scientific Advisory Board

Pangea Biomed, the RNA-focused precision oncology biotech company, today announced that it has appointed Ezra Cohen, MD, FRSPSC, FASCO, to chair the company’s scientific advisory board. 

Dr. Cohen, an internationally-renowned cancer researcher, currently serves as Division Chief of UC San Diego Health Hematology-Oncology division, co-director of their Precision Immunotherapy Clinic, and as associate director for Translational Science at Moores Cancer Center. Cohen is also the leader of the center’s Solid Tumor Therapeutics research program. He was previously co-director of the Head and Neck Cancer Program at the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center and has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles, leads a laboratory that studies novel cancer treatments, and has served as the principal investigator of multiple clinical trials on new drugs for head and neck cancer and other solid tumors. 

“As we grow our R&D team and expand our partnerships and commercial collaborations, Dr. Cohen’s deep oncological expertise, clinical trial insight, and leadership will be invaluable to our team,” said Pangea CEO Tuvik Beker. “We’re grateful to have an internationally-renowned cancer researcher who has made major contributions to the advancement of targeted cancer therapies at the helm of our advisory board.”

This announcement comes on the heels of Pangea’s launch from stealth with the most advanced multi-cancer response predictor – the ENLIGHT platform – and $7 million in seed funding from NFX. ENLIGHT can interpret tumor RNA data alongside genomic data to identify a treatment’s efficacy potential for individual patients. The technology’s unsupervised learning techniques can help better design clinical trials and accelerate drug discovery and development. The unsupervised approach makes ENLIGHT scalable and effective in situations where large training cohorts aren’t available, as is the case in most drug development scenarios.

”The bulk of my research has revolved around advancing precision immunotherapy – which accounts for differences between patients’ cancers and immune systems to design treatments for small groups of people or even individuals,“ said Dr. Cohen. ”I joined Pangea’s scientific advisory board and subsequently accepted the role of chairman of the board because I see the potential impact that Pangea’s technology has on improving precision drug development. I can also see the promise that ENLIGHT has in optimizing precision oncology so that more cancer patients can benefit and hopefully see their cancer eradicated"

In addition to Dr. Cohen, the scientific advisory board includes: 

• Raanan Berger, MD, Ph.D., Director of the Cancer Center at Sheba Medical Center
• Eyal Gottlieb, Ph.D., Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Chair of Cancer Research for the Faculty of Medicine at Technion Israel Institute of Technology
• J. Silvio Gutkind, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the Department of Pharmacology at UCSD School of Medicine and Associate Director for Basic Science at Moores Cancer Center
• Dan A. Landau, MD, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and Core Member at the New York Genome Center
• Gideon Rechavi, MD, Ph.D., head of Sheba Cancer Research Center and head of the Wohl Institute for Translational Medicine
• Ze’ev Ronai, Ph.D., Director of the NCI-Designated Cancer Center at Sanford Burnham Prebys Discovery Institute
• Eytan Ruppin, MD, Ph.D., Chief of the Cancer Data Science Lab at the National Cancer Institute

The efficacy of Pangea’s technology was underscored in a recent bioRxiv preprint, which validates ENLIGHT as one of the first approaches to demonstrably predict therapeutic response across multiple cancer types by leveraging the transcriptome.

To learn more about Pangea and ENLIGHT, please visit https://pangeabiomed.com.

About Pangea Biomed

Founded in 2018, Pangea Biomed developed ENLIGHT – the world’s most advanced multi-cancer, multi-therapy response predictor. By combining machine learning and deep RNA analysis, the company is mapping tumor molecular signatures to dynamically and adaptively personalize cancer care for a healthier world. Pangea aims to bring effective precision oncology to cancer patients, improve oncology drug development and empower oncologists to treat patients with success. Pangea is backed by NFX, and its technology has been published in leading journals, including Cell, Science Advances, Cancer Cell and Nature Communications. 

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