Bengaluru-based startup Mestastop Solutions has entered into a research study agreement with cancer researchers at St. Johns Research Institute (SJRI), a unit under the CBCI Society of Medical Institution.

Under this agreement, both parties will have a research collaboration to conduct retrospective and prospective studies with patients' clinical data. The retrospective study will involve scientists mining data of breast cancer patient cohorts and their clinical annotations, followed by Mestastop applying machine learning to identify drug effects on survival.

Dr Jyoti S Prabhu, from the Division of Molecular Medicine, SJRI and Dr Arnab Roy Chowdhury, Director, Mestastop, will co-lead this programme, with Dr Judhajit Sanyal, Senior Data Scientist from Mestastop supervising the machine learning.

Mestastop has created three proprietary platforms, METAssay®, METVivo® and METSCAN®, to dissect metastasis biology in both in vitro and in vivo animal model settings. The platforms have been further validated with ex-vivo patient tumours and integrated with algorithms to identify rate-limiting steps of metastasis, thereby identifying relevant targets for drug discovery and also identifying primary tumour patients who are at a higher risk of metastasis.

The Cancer Research group at St. Johns Research Institute has done pioneering work with breast cancer (BC) patient cohorts, analysing tumour characteristics and performing decade-long follow-ups on their survival status. SJRI has immense expertise in analysing tumour tissue from fresh and fixed biological material, liquid biopsy, data mining and bioinformatics to extract relevant scientific information.