NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – NanoString Technologies announced today that it is collaborating with the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program (CTEP) of the National Cancer Institute to gauge the clinical validation and utility of novel immune-based gene signatures to better inform treatment decisions for cancer patients.
The partners will incorporate NanoString's PanCancer Immuno-Oncology 360 panel in NCI-sponsored trials to characterize immune activity and develop potentially predictive gene signatures. The collaboration supports CTEP's efforts to implement novel strategies to correlate therapeutic treatment with patient response across a range of tumor types, NanoString said.
The PanCancer IO 360 panel consists of 770 genes and is designed to characterize mechanisms of tumor immune evasion and identify targetable therapeutic pathways by using several gene signatures to describe key biological processes. The panel is designed around the Tumor Inflammation Signature (TIS), an 18-gene signature which measures the presence or absence of a peripherally suppressed adaptive immune response within the tumor that enriches for patient response to a variety of different cancer immunotherapies. It also contains additional gene expression signatures to characterize the presence of immune cells within the tumor microenvironment and other biological mechanisms such as IFN signaling, expression of key immune checkpoint molecules, DNA mismatch repair status, MAGE expression, antigen processing and presentation, oxygenation or hypoxia, and vascularization.
One of the first NCI-sponsored clinical trials in the collaboration will be led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researcher Stephen Hodi, who noted in a statement that the expansion of gene expression profiling could help investigators better understand and predict response to immuno-modulatory treatments such as pembrolizumab combined with ziv-aflibercept.
"We believe that this collaboration presents a unique opportunity to apply in the translational research setting the latest generation of transcriptional profiling tools to NCI-sponsored clinical trials and to accelerate the development and implementation of novel immunotherapies and related diagnostics," added NanoString Chief Medical Officer Alessandra Cesano.
In April, NanoString launched the Breast Cancer 360T research panel, the second in the series after the IO panel. The breast panel provides a multimodal analysis of tumor gene expression, microenvironment, and immune response, and includes content across important breast cancer pathways and validated signatures including NanoString's PAM50 signature for breast cancer subtyping, and its TIS, as well as other targets involved in DNA damage repair deficiency, inhibitory immune signaling, and immune cell population abundance.