Cofactor Rapidly Transferring Immunotherapy Predictive Take a look at to Market With Information From Intermountain Spinout
NEW YORK — After announcing a collaboration with Intermountain Health spinout Culmination Bio earlier this week, Cofactor Genomics is moving “aggressively” to advance its OncoPrism test, which can predict whether patients with a number of cancers are likely to develop cancers will benefit from immunotherapy.
San Francisco-based Cofactor has validated OncoPrism, an RNA sequencing-based T-cell subtyping and immune cell quantification test, in the United States ADJUST AHEAD Study using anonymized tumor samples and matched clinical data. According to Jarret Glasscock, CEO of Cofactor, the goal is to commercialize OncoPrism as a tool to identify the patients most likely to respond to PD-1/L1 checkpoint inhibitors such as Merck’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab) or Bristol’s Opdivo (nivolumab). Approach Myers Squibb.
The prospective observational study has a target enrollment of 1,650 patients across 11 cancer types. But the new Culmination partnership is also critical to validating the test, Glasscock said, as it gives Cofactor access to a database of 4.5 million patient samples, each with data on longitudinal clinical outcomes as well as whole-genome, transcriptome, Exome sequencing and proteomics data are aligned. and other omics analysis.
This wealth of data, which Culmination calls its “Culmination Intelligence Platform”, is offered to partners such as Cofactor. Although the prospective validation of OncoPrism using samples collected in PREDAPT is critical to demonstrate its predictive power across multiple cancer types, Glasscock says the data from Culmination Cofactor offers significant benefits, not just in terms of the sheer number of patient samples in the repository, but also in terms of time.
“We need to know the patient outcomes of these immunotherapy treatments [to validate OncoPrism]. “With the prospective data that will be collected as part of PREDAPT, we will have to wait months for the outcome to have the full data,” Glasscock said. “For prospective studies, we wait for patients.” [to respond]The value of Culmination Bio is that these patient samples and the high quality patient data have already been collected and stored. This allows us to move forward with our efforts much faster.”
Cofactor’s OncoPrism test is essentially an immune profiling platform, as described by Glasscock. “We are looking at the most meaningful gene expression signatures, which can be assigned to the immune cell types and immune cell states, and which are most likely to allow predictions about possible responders and non-responders to immunotherapy,” he said, explaining that the OncoPrism platform essentially provides a measurement of these several analytes. “The clinical data comes into play when we train the model to say, ‘What does a profile look like for lung cancer responders? What does a non-responder profile look like?’”
While the OncoPrism platform is already in place, the millions of linked clinical data in the Culmination Intelligence Platform will help Cofactor train its test to predict immunotherapy responses in different types of cancer, much faster.
To date, Cofactor has made the most progress validating OncoPrism for predicting which head and neck cancer patients will benefit from immunotherapy, in what Glasscock described as the company’s “curbstone indication”. In September 2022, The company presented data This shows that OncoPrism more accurately predicted the anti-PD-1 benefit in head and neck cancer patients than immunohistochemistry-based PD-L1 expression, which many oncologists consider “on”.lousy biomarker” to identify the best responders to immunotherapy. In this study, OncoPrism showed a 75 percent accuracy in predicting immune checkpoint inhibitor responders, while PD-L1 immunohistochemistry tests showed an accuracy of 42 percent.
With this readout, Cofactor is “on the right track in head and neck cancer” and, according to Glasscock, is aiming to commercialize OncoPrism in this setting as a lab-developed test in the “very near future,” according to Glasscock. He added that the company is already working with physicians across the country to prepare for commercial launch in the treatment of head and neck cancer later this year, and eyeing lung cancer shortly thereafter.
“We’re nearing the finish line, but I’m also very excited about the next nine cancer indications and how Culmination’s data will really accelerate timelines for those,” he said, noting that Cofactor placed particular emphasis on the depth and quality of the Data places points that partners can query in Culmination Bio’s repository when attempting to identify populations of interest.
Spinout Intermountain Health – which was incorporated as a company in June 2022 and launched publicly in March 2023 – is showcasing its Culmination Intelligence Platform as a search engine for building precision medicine cohorts. According to the information on the website, partners can query the data archive based on factors such as age, gender, race, cancer type, biomarker status and ICD codes, and focus on the patient cohort they wish to study.
“Culmination Bio was designed to expand the success of Intermountain’s precision medicine efforts by creating multimodal longitudinal datasets,” said Lincoln Nadauld, Culmination’s CEO, in a statement in March announcing the formation of the company. “Our partnership with Intermountain Health has enabled us to build a platform that will revolutionize the way we identify new clinical insights and translate them to the benefit of patients.”
Culmination Bio, which has not disclosed any partnerships other than those with Cofactor, declined an interview for this article. Therefore, no details are known about the diversity and geographical representation of the database. Intermountain Health operates 33 hospitals primarily in Utah, Idaho and Nevada, but also has affiliated locations in other areas.
“I know [Intermountain] They’ve been building this database for decades and it’s an extensive collection of samples that they use in their own homes,” Glasscock said. “This commercial launch of Culmination Bio is an attempt to harness this rich resource outside of your four walls.”
