The firm's vaccine, which previously led to tumor regression in a patient with metastatic breast cancer, is scheduled to enter clinical trials in 2017.
The platform will be designed to gather all necessary data from a single RNA extraction, eliminating the need for flow cytometry, genomic sequencing, and expression profiling.
Tempus will sequence and analyze pancreatic and melanoma cancer data from Penn patients to identify patterns associated with a positive response to treatment.
Merck is hoping NanoString's multiplex platform can support gene expression signatures that will better predict which patients will respond to checkpoint inhibitors like its Keytruda.
Clinical MDx firm OmniSeq has been an early-access user of the research-use-only assay and is working on validating it to predict checkpoint inhibitor response.
Data for hundreds of breast tumors suggested specific signatures were more closely linked to tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte activity than was mutational load.
The deal will leverage BioNTech's IVAC Mutanome platform, which uses next-generation sequencing to identify targets for personalized mRNA-based vaccines.
The Hastings Center's Erik Parens argues in a Scientific American opinion piece that the current pandemic underscores the need to reconsider the hope placed in genomic medicine.
