NEW YORK – Immunotherapy developer Advaxis and sequencing firm Personalis said today that they have entered an extended collaboration agreement, under which they are using Personalis' ImmunoID NeXT Platform for biomarker discovery in Advaxis' ongoing Phase I/II program advancing the investigational ADXS-503 alone and in combination with pembrolizumab for patients with non-small cell lung cancer.
ADXS-503 is an antigen delivery construct that targets 11 public or shared neoantigens associated with hotspots in KRAS, EGFR and TP53, as well as 11 other proprietary tumor-associated antigen targets.
Under the terms of the expanded agreement, Personalis will conduct comprehensive tumor immunogenomic profiling to identify predictive composite biomarkers and/or signatures of response. The company will also use the platform to identify potential mechanisms of therapy resistance.
The company's ImmunoID NeXT offers deep analysis of both DNA and RNA across approximately 20,000 genes, providing a multidimensional view of the tumor and the immune microenvironment from a single sample.
"With the emerging clinical signals we are seeing in our ongoing ADXS-503 clinical study and the extensive capabilities of ImmunoID NeXT to interrogate a patient's tumor and immune response at both the DNA- and RNA-level … [we believe] the analysis will help guide our development plans in order to target the right patient population and to potentially increase the clinical benefit of our off-the-shelf, ADXS-HOT drug constructs," Advaxis Chief Medical Officer Andres Gutierrez said in a statement.
The new agreement for ADXS-503 builds upon a prior two-year collaboration between the firms in which Personalis' genomic analysis of clinical tumor samples was used to develop Advaxis' ADXS-NEO drug construct, a platform for personalized, neoantigen-directed immunotherapy for a variety of late-stage cancers.