NEW YORK – Fox Chase Cancer Center and digital health startup Genome Profiling (GenPro) have partnered to identify a new immune system epigenetic biomarker to predict patient response to anti-PD1 antibody checkpoint inhibitor therapy.
Wayne, Pennsylvania-based GenPro will use its EpiMarker machine-learning platform and method to identify an interactive network of genomic DNA methylation sites in patients' circulating immune cells that may be predictive of response to therapies.
GenPro's platform can be used to discover and validate unique immuno-epigenetic response to a disease or disease change and codifies it into a novel computational tool called an EpiMarker.
"Despite the tremendous advances in lung cancer driven by the availability of anti-PD1 antibodies, only a minority of patients experience significant and long-lasting benefit," Hossein Borghaie, chief of thoracic oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center, said in a statement. "With current approaches, it's difficult to know exactly which patients will benefit, and improving that diagnostic ability is a key focus in the lung cancer immune-oncology field."
Financial details of the agreement were undisclosed.
"[Fox Chase's] clinical knowledge and insights are a tremendous complement to Genome's Profiling expertise," Adam Marsh, CSO and cofounder of GenPro, said in a statement. "The collaboration has great potential to result in better patient care practices and to avoid unnecessary treatment, … side effects, and costs."