New York (GenomeWeb) – Members of the Immunomonitor consortium have received €2 million ($2.3 million) in grant funding from the EUROSTARS program to support the clinical validation of an immuno-sequencing analysis solution for monitoring treatment responses to cancer vaccines.
The members of the consortium are Enpicom, a Dutch bioinformatics company that offers software for target discovery and development in the immunotherapy space; Biomax Informatics, which develops and markets knowledge management solutions; Ultimovacs, a pharmaceutical company that aims to develop vaccines for cancer; researchers at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE); and Ose Immunotherapeutics, a biotechnology company that is developing immunotherapies for immune activation and regulation in the context of immuno-oncology and autoimmune diseases.
According to the consortium, the project — called the Treatment Response Monitoring for Cancer Immunotherapies Using Immune Repertoire Analysis — seeks to validate data analysis and visualization software for analyzing immune repertoire sequencing data gleaned from blood samples. The planned solution will be able to capture and monitor a patient's dynamic immune responses to the vaccines over a period of time using a so-called immune status fingerprint. Planned clinical validation studies will focus on two cancer vaccines, developed by Ultimovacs and Ose Immunotherapeutics, for pancreatic and lung cancers as well as malignant melanomas, the consortium added.
"TCR/BCR repertoire data analysis is a new and powerful technology to analyze the immune status of patients and guide immunotherapies," Mascha Binder, deputy clinic director of UKE's department of internal medicine, said in a statement. "Within this project, we aim to prove its true value in treatment responses to cancer vaccines."