Plus Therapeutics is evolving its business and has rebranded as Cerenome to reflect its expansion.
The company is currently working on Reyobiq, or rhenium-186 obisbemeda, an investigational radiotherapeutic agent for the treatment of rare and aggressive central nervous system (CNS) cancers.
It also markets CNSide, an advanced cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) diagnostic assay designed to identify and monitor tumor cells that have spread to the central nervous system.
As part of the change the company is now also delving more deeply into artificial intelligence.
The company said in a statement that its initial focus is on “building proprietary workflows and data infrastructure that will improve operating efficiency, support clinical and laboratory execution and enable advanced data analytics and machine learning across the company’s proprietary CNS oncology datasets.”
This comes after it teamed up with Ephemeral Technologies in May to help boost its AI and dataset business.
The new name reflects the company’s focus on central nervous system cancers and on integrating therapy, diagnostics and data. Cerenome now combines “cere,” referencing the brain, with “ome,” which alludes to the full set of data and biological information the company is working on.
“In simple terms, we are no longer a pure-play radiotherapeutics company, and we needed to align the company name to its identity,” explained Marc Hedrick, President, CEO and Director of Cerenome, in a call to investors Tuesday, June 30.
“The old name described one part of the company. The new name is intended to reflect the company we are building each day and the opportunity ahead of us.”
Hedrick added that this didn’t mean that the direction of the company was changing.
“The name change is simply the capstone of the actions management has taken for the past few quarters. The story isn't changing. It's actually continuing to evolve and ramp as the opportunity as we see it expands.”
On August 3, the company will also change its ticker on the Nasdaq to “CNSY.”
On that day, it will further launch its new corporate website, “alongside a coordinated series of investor, press and social media communications,” Hedrick said.