Oct 4 2018
HalioDx, an immuno-oncology company pioneering the immunological diagnosis of cancers, announces the availability of Brightplex, a novel high capacity IHC multiplex technology enabling multiple biomarkers to be analyzed on a single FFPE slide. The workflow is automated and takes advantage of brightfield staining with standardized reagents, proprietary know-how and advanced image analysis to enable the robust analysis of up to 7 biomarkers or a combination of it on a single slide. The image analysis component of the Brightplex technology leverages the Indica Labs HALO image analysis platform.
The technology targets Immuno-oncology translational activities of pharmaceutical industries, a highly dynamic field.
The first panel, Brightplex TCE, uses a combination of 5 biomarkers to identify exhausted T cells, i.e. cytotoxic T cells with poor effector function that sustain expression of inhibitory receptors such as PD-1, but also LAG-3 or TIM-3 for which clinical trials are currently ongoing. It has been presented at the 4th CRI-CIMT-EATI-AACR International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference on September 30th, 2018.
The second panel, Brightplex MDSC, uses a combination of 6 biomarkers to identify different subtypes of Myeloid Derived Suppressor Cells (MDSCs), PMN-MDSCs and M-MDSCs, that had thus far remained difficult to identify by IHC. The presence of these highly immuno-suppressive cells in the tumor microenvironment is associated with a poor prognosis; their depletion is under investigation in several clinical trials. The validation of the Brightplex MDSC panel will be presented at the Annual SITC Meeting which will take place on November 9th-11th, 2018.
Together, these 2 panels provide an invaluable set of tools to analyze the immune contexture of a tumor in translational and clinical research in immuno-oncology. Additional panels will be developed based on this new Brightplex technology.
“Identifying the right patient and therapy combination is more than ever a major challenge for clinical researchers and biopharmaceutical companies”, stresses Vincent FERT, CEO and co-founder of HalioDx. “Our multiplex panels represent a major progress in immune scoring, a technology that can now be extended to identify other families of immuno-suppressive cells to become ever more performant in precision immunotherapy of cancers.”
The development of Brightplex TCE and Brightplex MDSC was supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) in the context of the PIONeeR project, a 5-year research program that aims to better understand, predict and overcome anti-PD-1/PD-L1 resistance in advanced lung cancer patients.
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