NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – French companion diagnostics firm ImmunID announced today that it has signed a deal with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) to clinically validate its ImmunTracker assay as a predictor of patient response to cancer immunotherapy.
ImmunTracker is a PCR-based system that detects gene recombinations in T cells, providing data about how a cancer patient's immune system is responding to a particular immunotherapy. In collaboration with MSKCC, ImmunID aims to test the assay in solid tumor patients being treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors.
In mid-2015, ImmunID and MSKCC collaborators reported that ImmunTracker-based analysis of peripheral T cell receptor diversity could be associated with clinical outcomes in metastatic melanoma patients receiving Bristol-Myers Squibb's Yervoy (ipilimumab).
The newly announced deal with MSKCC "will allow not only to further validate ImmunTracker's predictive power for anti-CTLA4 and anti-PD1 in metastatic melanoma, but also to expand ImmunTracker's clinical utility to next-generation immuno-oncology approaches and in additional tumor types," ImmunID Co-founder and CSO Nicolas Pasqual said in a statement.
Earlier this year, ImmunID announced that it had formed a collaboration with IRX Therapeutics to use ImmunTracker to assess the effects of IRX's investigational drug IRX-2 in a Phase IIb study in patients with head and neck squamous cell cancer.