Predictive Oncology’s (NASDAQ: POAI) C-Level Lea
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- Bell2Bell podcast features company CEO, CFO, CTO of Helomics subsidiary
- POAI is “in probably the best situation we’ve been in since the existence of the company,” reports CFO
- Company anticipates revenue from its unique PeDAL platform
Three Predictive Oncology (NASDAQ: POAI) executives were featured guests on a recent Bell2Bell podcast (https://nnw.fm/uSxkU). Newly appointed CEO Mel Engle, CFO Bob Myers and Mark Collins, chief technical officer of the company’s Helomics subsidiary, shared updates regarding POAI’s financial footing, current operations and goals for 2021 during the podcast, which delivers informative updates and exclusive interviews with executives operating in fast-moving industries.
Named Predictive Oncology’s new CEO in March, Engle provided a summary of his journey to becoming head of the precision medicine company. “I’ve been on the board of Predictive Oncology for about four years, and within the last year and a half, I’ve been the chairman of the board,” he said. “Being in that kind of position, it’s easier for me to be able to step into this role.”
In addition to his POAI expertise, Engle noted that he has filled the roles of CEO in several previous companies, including Merck subsidiary and pharmaceutical company Dey Laboratories. “We were a $610 million company when sold to Mylan back in 2007,” he continued. “That was a pharmaceutical respiratory company, so I’m very familiar with the ins-and-outs of R&D and the notion of what Predictive Oncology is doing.”
During his remarks, Myers reported that from a financial standpoint, POAI is “in a great situation, probably the best situation we’ve been in since the existence of the company, in terms of our cash capability and the strength of our balance sheet, and the fact that we have a lot of things going on . . . in terms of the income that we expect to get this year and the projects that we have,” he said. “We are going into these projects in the strength position.”
Collins then provided an update on POAI’s Helomics, noting that one of the most important projects the company is working on — and that it expects to see revenue results from — is its PeDAL platform, or patient-centric drug discovery using active learning. PeDAL is a unique technology that combines a proprietary, clinically validated patient tumor cell line assay with a vast knowledge base of proprietary and public data together with active learning (https://nnw.fm/SdNVQ).
“What this platform does is it’s a fee-for-service platform for pharmaceutical companies to test their drugs against our cancer cell lines, like doing, if you will, a clinical trial in a plastic dish,” said Collins. “Because we have all these patient cell lines that we have knowledge of . . . what drug they were treated with and so on. And we believe this will revolutionize the way that pharma does drug discovery.”
Collins also reported that, earlier this year, the company launched an internal drug repositioning project where POAI is actually testing known anti-cancer drugs against its patient cell lines, driven by the machine learning. The project is designed “to generate some proof data for the platform that’s important for commercial discussion but also to generate some valuable intellectual property about those compounds and their activity against specific tumors and specific patient profiles,” said Collins.
“Again, that puts us firmly in the AI drug-discovery category, which is where the analysts. . . have indicated that we are a potential emerging player, with a very strong potential in that space.”
POAI is bringing precision medicine, or tailored medical treatment using the individual characteristics of each patient, to the treatment of cancer. Through its Helomics division, the company leverages its unique, clinically validated patient derived (“PDx”) smart tumor profiling platform to provide oncologists with a roadmap to help individualize therapy. In addition, the company is leveraging artificial intelligence and its proprietary database of more than 150,000 cancer cases tumors to build AI-driven models of tumor drug response to improve outcomes for the patients of today and tomorrow.
For more information, visit the company’s website at www.Predictive-Oncology.com.
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