NEW YORK – NanoView Biosciences said on Thursday that it has signed an agreement with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to study biomarkers carried by exosomes in patients undergoing immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy (ICIT) for cancer.
As part of the "ExoPDL-1 to Predict Immunotherapy Response in Cancer" (EPIC) study, the team will use Boston-based NanoView's ExoView platform to characterize PD-L1 and other biomarkers carried by exosomes in plasma samples from patients undergoing ICIT.
The research-use-only ExoView platform is an antibody labeling and imaging-based tool that offers high-resolution sizing, counting, and phenotyping of extracellular vesicles and viral vectors.
Bruno Bockorny, an oncologist from BIDMC, will serve as the study's principal investigator. Co-investigators will include Vassiliki Boussiotis, professor at BIDMC, and Daniel Costa, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
"Our current ability to predict which patients are most likely to benefit from immunotherapy is very limited," Boussiotis said in a statement. "Even for cancer types with significant level of PD-L1 expression … there is [frequently] discordance between PD-L1 expression level and response to treatment."
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
"We are pleased that BIDMC will help evaluate data from our ExoView platform to better understand the role that exosome-associated biomarkers play in disease status and therapeutic response for cancer patients," Jerry Williamson, CEO of NanoView, said in a statement.
NanoView previously signed an exclusive agreement with Quantum Design to distribute the ExoView platform in China.