26 September 2019 - Genomics and personalized medicine. Takis, the Italian excellence in biotechnology, challenges Europe!

The company of the Tecnopolo di Castel Romano in Rome is among the 7 finalists of the European Health Catapult. The final will be held on 2 and 3 December in Paris.

26 September, ROME - Takis with its advanced projects presented a personalized therapeutic vaccine against cancer at the European Health Catapult Initiative earning its place in the final. A result achieved thanks to the creation of a personalized therapeutic vaccine against cancer. It is therefore a new challenge that aims at personalized medicine, genomics and cellular therapies that many people see as a necessary path on which to invest.

The genome of each tumor, in fact, presents mutations that differ from patient to patient and generate abnormal proteins called neo-antigens, absent in healthy cells. The vaccine designed by Takis instructs the cells of the immune system to recognize tumor neo-antigens and to destroy only the cells that express them. But since every tumor is different, each patient needs a tailored therapy: the starting point is the sequencing of the tumor genome, which helps the researchers to build an ad hoc vaccine.

This is an innovative project, which Takis researchers are pursuing with competence and enthusiasm. And that at European Health Catapult, in which 42 start-ups participated in Europe, has already captured the interest of investors, confirming once again the excellence of Italian research in the oncology field.

"We are proud of this result - said Luigi Aurisicchio, CEO of Takis -. In recent years we have undertaken many projects and we have dedicated ourselves to developing increasingly targeted and effective therapies against cancer. The merit is, above all, of our researchers, who put passion into what we do day after day to help patients in oncology ".

Fabio Palombo, head of the research program, is of the same opinion: "Thanks to the growing knowledge in Immuno-Oncology, to the Next Generation Sequencing and to ever more effective technologies, it is now possible to think of approaches to personalized medicine inconceivable until a few years ago. And we Italians with our ideas and our imagination, we can make a huge contribution to this constantly evolving field ".

With his experience in innovative cancer therapies, Takis is the only Italian company to have achieved this goal, proving to be among the 7 best biotech companies in Europe. Thanks to an intense research activity, which has succeeded in intercepting the most advanced topics in the fight against cancer in recent years. Such as immunotherapy, which uses the immune system to fight cancer, giving life to potentially more effective therapies than traditional ones, and above all more targeted. The scientific production of Takis, in fact, appears to be increasingly oriented towards the future, which is that of precision medicine and tailored to the patient. A possibility that today, thanks to in-depth knowledge of the human genome, is becoming more and more concrete.