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ScinoPharm and Lee's Pharmaceutical jointly develop drug products for the Chinese market.

WuXi PharmaTech begins construction of new R&D and cGMP manufacturing campus in Changzhou.

NeoStem signs Licensing Agreement with Cellular Biomedicine Group and plans to begin Phase 2 hepatocellular carcinoma trial in China.

Abiogen Pharma signed agreement with Lee's Pharma to market Neridronic Acid in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

InSightec launches its first centers in China.

Shuwen Biotech and DiagnoCure sign exclusive agreement for commercializing colorectal cancer staging test in China.

The Jackson Laboratory and Frasergen to begin creation of cancer genomics facility in Hubei Province, China.

RuiYi and iHuman Institute form collaboration to identify novel antibodies targeting GPCRs.

Enigma Diagnostics and China's ICDC collaborate to develop MDX infectious disease assays for use at point-of-care.

Drug to inhibit liver cancer discovered.

Transfer learning (TL) algorithms aim to improve the prediction performance in a target task (e.g. the prediction of cisplatin sensitivity in triple-negative breast cancer patients) via transferring knowledge from auxiliary data of a related task (e.g. the prediction of docetaxel sensitivity in breast cancer patients), where the distribution and even the feature space of the data pertaining to the tasks can be different. In real-world applications, we sometimes have a limited training set in a target task while we have auxiliary data from a related task. To obtain a better prediction performance in the target task, supervised learning requires a sufficiently large training set in the target task to perform well in predicting future test examples of the target task. In this paper, we propose a TL approach for cancer drug sensitivity prediction, where our approach combines three techniques. First, we shift the representation of a subset of examples from auxiliary data of a related task to a representation closer to a target training set of a target task. Second, we align the shifted representation of the selected examples of the auxiliary data to the target training set to obtain examples with representation aligned to the target training set. Third, we train machine learning algorithms using both the target training set and the aligned examples. We evaluate the performance of our approach against baseline approaches using the Area Under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) Curve (AUC) on real clinical trial datasets pertaining to multiple myeloma, nonsmall cell lung cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, and breast cancer. Experimental results show that our approach is better than the baseline approaches in terms of performance and statistical significance.

Cancer subtype identification is an unmet need in precision diagnosis. Recently, evolutionary conservation has been indicated to contain informative signatures for functional significance in cancers. However, the importance of evolutionary conservation in distinguishing cancer subtypes remains largely unclear. Here, we identified the evolutionarily conserved genes (i.e. core genes) and observed that they are primarily involved in cellular pathways relevant to cell growth and metabolisms. By using these core genes, we developed two novel strategies, namely a feature-based strategy (FES) and an image-based strategy (IMS) by integrating their evolutionary and genomic profiles with the deep learning algorithm. In comparison with the FES using the random set and the strategy using the PAM50 classifier, the core gene set-based FES achieved a higher accuracy for identifying breast cancer subtypes. The IMS and FES using the core gene set yielded better performances than the other strategies, in terms of classifying both breast cancer subtypes and multiple cancer types. Moreover, the IMS is reproducible even using different gene expression data (i.e. RNA-seq and microarray). Comprehensive analysis of eight cancer types demonstrates that our evolutionary conservation-based models represent a valid and helpful approach for identifying cancer subtypes and the core gene set offers distinguishable clues of cancer subtypes.

The study and treatment of cancer is traditionally specialized to the cancer’s site of origin. However, certain phenotypes are shared across cancer types and have important implications for clinical care. To date, automating the identification of these characteristics from routine clinical data - irrespective of the type of cancer - is impaired by tissue-specific variability and limited labeled data. Whole-genome doubling is one such phenotype; whole-genome doubling events occur in nearly every type of cancer and have significant prognostic implications. Using digitized histopathology slide images of primary tumor biopsies, we train a deep neural network end-to-end to accurately generalize few-shot classification of whole-genome doubling across 17 cancer types. By taking a meta-learning approach, cancer types are treated as separate but jointly-learned tasks. This approach outperforms a traditional neural network classifier and quickly generalizes to both held-out cancer types and batch effects. These results demonstrate the unrealized potential for meta-learning to not only account for between-cancer type variability but also remedy technical variability, enabling real-time identification of cancer phenotypes that are too often costly and inefficient to obtain.