NEW YORK – Tempus said on Wednesday that it will collaborate with A2 Biotherapeutics to develop a companion diagnostic test for A2's loss of heterozygosity-targeted cell therapy platform, Tmod.
According to Tempus, the partnership could also expand in the future to include development of additional CDx tests for A2’s other clinical development programs.
A2 develops cell therapies for cancer patients with solid tumors. It plans to use the LOH CDx assay, which will use Tempus' xT sequencing platform, to identify patients who would be eligible for Tmod — a novel cell therapy that uses engineered T cells to target this loss of genetic material, enabling the selective killing of tumor cells while leaving normal cells unharmed.
"We identified Tempus as the ideal collaborator for this CDx given its smart genomic testing platform and the scope of its dataset," William Go, A2's senior VP and head of development, said in a statement.
Tempus’ comprehensive sequencing platform provides a variety of information, including readouts of immune infiltration, neoantigen prediction, assessment of tumor mutational burden, microsatellite instability, HLA typing, HLA loss of heterozygosity, sequencing of the T-cell receptor and B-cell receptor repertoire, and detection of oncoviruses.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.