Cancer Care
How Shepherd Works
What SHEPHERD Does
SHEPHERD's technology identifies therapies specific to your tumor’s RNA. Via mathematical analysis, it is able to identify gene expression patterns — sometimes hundreds of them — that can lead to response to specific therapies. Every patient’s data is analyzed across over 450 drugs, including FDA-approved, repurposed, and adjuvant therapies. Because it does not rely principally on mutational data, SHEPHERD has a much higher chance of finding therapeutic matches than typical DNA-based methods. This means SHEPHERD can help find drugs for even the hardest-to-treat cancers, including pediatric, metastatic, and rare.
Most important multi-target approach
The result, an RNA “signature” that identifies all the genes responsible for drug response and resistance — simultaneously.
What SHEPHERD Does
SHEPHERD's technology identifies therapies specific to your tumor’s RNA. Via mathematical analysis, it is able to identify gene expression patterns — sometimes hundreds of them — that can lead to response to specific therapies. Every patient’s data is analyzed across over 509 drugs, including FDA-approved, repurposed, and adjuvant therapies. Because it does not rely principally on mutational data, SHEPHERD has a much higher chance of finding therapeutic matches than typical DNA-based methods. This means SHEPHERD can help find drugs for even the hardest-to-treat cancers, including pediatric, metastatic, and rare.
Drugs work in different ways for different people
Cancer is not generalizable. Even though there are agreed-upon groups of cancers with similar traits, every individual patient has their own distinct cancer, with its own distinct characteristics, that can be seen in the tumor’s DNA and RNA.
Similarly, drugs have a wide array of impacts. A drug’s mechanisms of action can affect each patient slightly differently because of these variations, which is why using the patient’s distinct transcriptional signature to predict efficacious drugs is vitally important.
Understanding a drug's impact across many forms of cancer
Most drugs are developed for specific forms of cancer. That means they may never have been tested for many types of cancer for which they could be effective. SHEPHERD helps overcome this weakness of drug development by using data related to drug impact on many forms of cancer to train its algorithm. The result is an ability to understand a drug’s potential to work in a wide range of both common and understudied cancers — including yours.
More than AI
More evidence. Increased precision.
In addition to the transcriptomic signature, SHEPHERD curates additional evidence in the form of FDA approvals, treatment guidelines, clinical trials, literature, bioinformatic analysis, and mechanism analysis — all specific to you — to finalize drug and drug combination identification.
Therapeutic matches regardless of specific cancer or stage of disease
SHEPHERD is able to match patients with FDA-approved therapies regardless of age of the patient, specific diagnosis, pre-treatment history, or stage of disease.
The SHEPHERD Report
Single Agents
Each drug is matched to a tumor via a specific equation derived from its response-resistance signature. When a tumor transcriptome matches a drug, it indicates that existing data shows a high probability that the therapy may provide therapeutic benefit.
Combo Agents
Combinations are created from single agents that pass all of DELVE’s tests. Combinations can include known combinations that are part of existing treatment protocols, or novel combinations of drugs that have evidence for use for each specific patient and tumor.
