MOSAIC is launched to power a revolution in oncology research

‍Data will be generated for thousands of patients in 7+ cancer indications

[List of Partners having signed Letter of Agreement] join leading AI and spatial-omics companies to discover new cancer treatments

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AI biotech company Owkin and the world’s leading cancer centers are launching the first-ever high-resolution spatial atlas of cancer cells and their interaction with other cells within the tumor microenvironment, enabling artificial intelligence (AI) to unlock the next wave of treatments for some of the most difficult-to-treat cancers.

[X] cancer research centers and NanoString Technologies, Inc., a leader in spatial biology, are working with Owkin to create MOSAIC (Multi Omics & Spatial Atlas In Cancer) – a revolutionary spatial omics database designed to discover the next generation of breakthroughs in cancer research and personalize treatment for patients. Being established with an investment of $50 million from its partners, MOSAIC will be built with 7,000 tumor samples from patients, making it more than 100 times larger than existing spatial omics datasets.

MOSAIC will use spatial omics, a cutting-edge method of quantifying and localizing molecular expression that was named Method of the Year by Nature Methods last year. It gives scientists an unprecedented look at the structure of a tumor at close to the single cell level and reveals the interactions between tumor cells and non-tumor cells. Spatial omics both measures a molecule’s expression and maps it back to its location within the tumor sample, allowing scientists to ‘zoom in’ to tumor heterogeneity, cell-cell communications, and tumor-immune system interactions. As much of the development of cancer is driven by localized interactions within the tumor, this approach will enable researchers to make unprecedented scientific breakthroughs and transform our fundamental understanding of disease mechanisms.

Once the research centers’ patient data has been analyzed using NanoString’s spatial omics technology, Owkin will create a data platform and apply its machine learning expertise to discover novel cancer biology and potential therapies, powering a revolution in precision medicine. MOSAIC will initially focus on seven cancers with unmet medical needs – non-small cell lung cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, diffuse large B cell lymphoma, ovarian cancer, glioblastoma, mesothelioma, and bladder cancer. After an initial research period, MOSAIC and its standardized data generation and analysis methods will be opened to the global biomedical community to further advance oncology research.

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Gilles Wainrib, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Owkin, said:

“The convergence of spatial omics and deep learning will power the next revolution in oncology research, unlocking the next wave of breakthrough treatments for patients. We are excited for MOSAIC to help us and our partners to make unprecedented breakthroughs in the fight against cancer.”

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Whereas traditional ‘bulk’ and single-cell methods only produce information that is either averaged from millions of cells or missing cell-cell interactions, MOSAIC will allow scientists to look at the molecular profile of a tumor at a nearly single-cell level and to detect localized cell-to-cell interactions. Analyzing thousands of patient biopsies through this lens makes it possible to determine how tumor-immune interactions vary across populations, revealing new patient subtypes in each cancer indication. 

While some limited spatial omics studies exist, MOSAIC will far surpass these in terms of scale. Existing databases are two orders of magnitude too small to drive significant breakthroughs. Today, most studies involving these data modalities are limited by the sample size – usually under 50. MOSAIC will analyze data from 7,000 patients, allowing scientists to conduct research on data from cohorts 100 times larger than what is currently possible.

Joining MOSAIC as founding research hubs are cancer research centers at [To be replaced with names of all centers having signed term sheet for the MOSAIC Study]. Additional academic centers will also  join as Expert Partners in the coming months. 

Industrial partner NanoString will work closely with Owkin and the institutional partners to provide MOSAIC with a world-leading technological foundation for biomarker discovery and translational research, including through foundational use of NanoString’s GeoMx® Digital Spatial Profiler (DSP) and CosMx™ Spatial Molecular Imager (SMI) platforms.

[Other quotes from selected academic centers & industrial partner]

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About Owkin

Owkin is a French-American startup that uses artificial intelligence to find the right treatment for every patient. Our focus is to use AI to discover and develop better treatments for unmet medical needs, starting with the fight against cancer.

We use AI to identify new treatments, de-risk and accelerate clinical trials and build diagnostic tools that improve patient outcomes. Using federated learning, a pioneering collaborative AI framework, Owkin enables medical and biopharma partners to unlock valuable insights from siloed datasets while protecting patient privacy and securing proprietary data. 

Owkin was co-founded by Thomas Clozel MD, a former assistant professor in clinical onco-hematology, and Gilles Wainrib, a pioneer in the field of machine learning in biology, in 2016. Owkin has published research in Nature Medicine, Nature Communications and Hepatology, among other leading journals. Owkin has raised over $300 million and became a unicorn through a $180 million investment from biopharma company Sanofi in November 2021.

About NanoString Technologies, Inc.

NanoString Technologies is a leading provider of life science tools for discovery and translational research. The company provides three platforms that allow researchers to map the universe of biology. The nCounter® Analysis System, cited in more than 5,300 peer-reviewed publications, offers a way to easily profile the expression of hundreds of genes, proteins, miRNAs, or copy number variations, simultaneously with high sensitivity and precision. NanoString’s GeoMx® Digital Spatial Profiler enables highly multiplexed spatial profiling of RNA and protein targets in various sample types, including FFPE tissue sections, and has been cited in more than 120 peer-reviewed publications. The CosMx™ Spatial Molecular Imager, with commercial availability expected in 2022, enables highly sensitive, high-resolution imaging of hundreds to thousands of RNAs or proteins directly from single cells within morphologically intact whole tissue sections. For more information, visit www.nanostring.com.

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