Mestastop Solutions has entered into a Research Study Agreement with cancer researchers at St. Johns Research Institute (SJRI), Bangalore, 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. Speaking on the collaboration, Arnab said, “Dr Prabhu has been doing some seminal work with breast cancer patients and given our focus on triple-negative breast cancer, it was a very spontaneous round of discussions that led to this collaboration. Together, we aim to add definite value in solving the jigsaw puzzle of breast cancer progression”.  
” Though the incidence of cancer is raising across the globe, most cases can be cured if detected early. The Spread of the disease to other organs, termed metastasis, often leads to poor outcomes and is the most dreaded. The focus of Mestatstop Solutions is to delay or prevent metastasis, so we are glad to join hands in this journey to discover new methods to detect or delay this fatal phenomenon in cancer,” said Jyoti.

Mestastop has created three proprietary platforms, METAssay®, METVivo® and METSCAN®, to dissect metastasis biology in both in vitro and in vivo animal model settings (PCT/IN2021/050915 & PCT/IN2022/050928). 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 (PCT/IN2021/050915).

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 tumor tissue from fresh and fixed biological material, liquid biopsy, data mining and bioinformatics to extract relevant scientific information.