Breaking News: Liquid Biopsy Company IV Bioholdings Announces Partnership with International AI Company Sonrai Analytics

If a Generation "Y" version of Ferris Bueller walked up to you at Bella Vista in La Jolla and said, "If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it," he may be an executive at a liquid biopsy company. 

America's cancer diagnostics industry, where simple, non-invasive blood tests are exhibiting unprecedentedly meaningful information about a patient's cancer, is a hot commodity on Wall Street and Main Street. 

But if you don't stop to look around once in a while, you really could miss it.

Take IV BioHoldings (IVBH), a clinical-stage liquid biopsy company based in Newport Beach in Orange County, California. 

This morning, the company announced a meaningful multi-year partnership with Sonrai Analytics, an international artificial intelligence (AI) company that will further accelerate IVBH's efforts to transform the paradigm of precision medicine and save many lives.

Sonrai Analytics' AI applications will bolster IVBH’s analytic capabilities and enable the company to improve on clinical insights for the company’s pipeline of noninvasive blood tests for lung cancer, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and breast cancer. 

Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Sonrai adopts AI approaches to help biotech, CRO and pharma companies efficiently utilize their data. 

In a conversation yesterday with IVBH Founder-CEO Marty Keiser (left), a family man with a refreshing, almost Quixotic take on the work he is doing, he noted that in the digital age, "Abundance beats scarcity every single time. The partnership with Sonrai will leverage AI and enable us to democratize healthcare research and development and accelerate massive value creation for all stakeholders through our novel and highly efficient decentralized partnership model.”

At IVBH, which was built to improve the detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other disease, the work moves at a steady but careful pace that investors love and cancer patients deserve. 

"We are seeing very exciting data emerging from the wet lab at the moment, with evidence of strong clinical efficacy and biological plausibility," he said. "The data is further confirming the novelty of our science and extending our competitive lead in the marketplace."

IVBH expects to begin clinical trials for the Mammogen genTRU-breast diagnostic program in the fourth quarter of 2022. Yes, this year. And the company expects to launch commercially in the first half of 2023. Yes, 2023.

Keiser's goal at Mammogen, which is one of several companies under the IVBH umbrella, is to "complement and enhance existing standards of care and emerging technologies, and get more patients to intervene earlier and reduce unnecessary procedures that are invasive, risky, expensive and stressful."

It seems like a marriage made in liquid biopsy heaven. Sonrai’s cloud-based platform provides full transparency and user-control, and brings the ability to manage structured and unstructured data sources and file types from small CSV files -- a plain text file that contains a list of data - to terabytes of Gigapixel images. 

And of course it also offers AI, machine learning and deep learning methods to extract maximum value from modern precision medicine digital approaches.

“From the very first meeting, it was evident that IVBH was approaching everything in a completely novel way,” Sonrai Founder-CEO Darragh McArt, PhD, said in a press statement. 

Over the last year, said Keiser, IVBH transitioned its time and resources institutionalizing the people, partners and infrastructure required to accelerate its diagnostic solutions to market with speed, efficiency, and a rigorous approach to risk mitigation

“The collaboration with Sonrai closes the loop for us," Keiser said, "providing IVBH with the dedicated data science, engineering and regulatory expertise — and the AI-powered solutions required to optimize the IVBH platform — from R&D through commercialization."