Uncovering Parkinson’s subtypes: insights from Victoria Catterson’s MJFF webinar

In June, Victoria Catterson, VP of Data Science Research at BioSymetrics (a Renovaro company), was honoured by the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) as one of 13 global Data Community Innovators for 2025–2026. The recognition highlights her leadership in open science and her contributions to MJFF’s Community of Practice, particularly in advancing data-driven research using the Parkinson’s Progressive Markers Initiative (PPMI) dataset.

As part of her new role, Victoria delivered a webinar in July, offering a comprehensive walkthrough of a machine learning pipeline developed at BioSymetrics to identify phenotypic subtypes of Parkinson’s disease. Her presentation covered data preprocessing, feature engineering across multiple clinical domains, unsupervised clustering, and model evaluation – balancing statistical rigour with the interpretability needed for clinical insight.

She also shared practical tips drawn from real-world analysis of the PPMI dataset, including strategies for handling noisy inputs, reducing dimensionality, and improving reproducibility. The full recording is available here: https://zenodo.org/records/15936672.

Full speed ahead: progress on LUMINA and glioblastoma projects

Renovaro Cube is moving full steam ahead across multiple fronts in precision healthcare. In July, the Cube team joined forces with Flomics, Oncodia AB, and Uppsala University to kick off the LUMINA Project – a collaborative initiative aimed at advancing cancer diagnostics. The consortium aligned on workstreams and timelines and agreed to begin one month earlier than scheduled, underscoring the shared commitment to accelerate progress.

In parallel, Cube’s glioblastoma project continues to show strong technical momentum. The team is developing an AI-powered clinical decision-support tool by integrating tumour-educated platelet RNA with MRI imaging to enhance disease monitoring and treatment decisions. Nebul compute environments are now live for deep learning training, RNA preprocessing workflows are being finalised, and the platelet RNA pipeline is under expert review with UMC Amsterdam – all laying the foundation for more accurate, personalized care.

Landmark study confirms therapeutic potential of Renovaro’s dendritic cell cancer therapy platform

Renovaro Biosciences has published landmark preclinical results in Vaccines, highlighting the efficacy of its next-generation dendritic cell (DC) therapy platform against pancreatic cancer. The study demonstrated that engineered DCs – developed from CD34⁺ stem cells and modified to express CD93, CD40L, and CXCL13 – induced significant tumour regression and strong immune activation in humanized mouse models. This work validates the scientific foundation of Renovaro’s allogeneic, off-the-shelf immunotherapy approach, designed to overcome the immunosuppressive barriers that often hinder treatment in solid tumours.

In these models, tumour volume was reduced by as much as 81.7%. The therapy triggered robust expansion of CD4⁺, CD8⁺, and NK cells in both blood and tumour tissues, and induced antigen-specific cytotoxicity against pancreatic cancer cells while sparing healthy ones. By leveraging CD34⁺ stem cells from healthy donors, this platform enables scalable production and cryopreservation of engineered DCs – a key step toward clinical translation. Renovaro plans to expand preclinical development to additional tumour types and explore combination strategies with checkpoint inhibitors and radioligand therapies, in line with its broader goal to personalize immune-enhancing treatments across a range of cancers.

The publication also honours the late Dr. Anahid Jewett, whose collaboration and immunological expertise were critical to the study’s success. Her contributions reflect the deep scientific rigour underpinning this work. Renovaro views this platform as a foundation for its growing pipeline and a springboard for AI-driven antigen discovery – a step toward more precise and durable cancer therapies. The full paper is available here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/13/7/749.

Join us as we drive machine learning precision medicine forward

There’s much more ahead – join us as we push the boundaries of machine learning precision medicine, especially in oncology and neurology. Follow and tag us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, and Threads.