Biotech Strategy Blog

Commentary on Science, Innovation & New Products with a focus on Oncology, Hematology & Cancer Immunotherapy

Posts tagged ‘Biomarkers’

ESMO16 Day 2 Digest

Copenhagen – it’s the end of Day 2 of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), which this year had a record-breaking 20,239 attendees.

esmo16-posters

Three of the presentations in today’s plenary Presidential Symposium were simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine – I haven’t seen that happen before.

All three were also featured in this morning’s media briefing in Copenhagen.

  • Ribociclib as First-Line Therapy for HR-Positive, Advanced Breast Cancer (NEJM link)
  • Prolonged Survival in Stage III Melanoma with ipilimumab Adjuvant Therapy (NEJM link)
  • Niraparib Maintenance Therapy in Platinum-Sensitive, Recurrent Ovarian Cancer (NEJM link)

In today’s daily digest there’s top-line commentary and insights from some of the sessions we attended. In a separate post, we have already discussed the niraparib data.

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HalioDX CEO Vincent Fert outlines commercial strategy for Immunoscore in US and Europe

Marseille – When it comes to biotech clusters for immunotherapy, Marseille, the second city of France, has to be right up there along with Boston, San Francisco in the United States and the “Golden Triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge and London in the UK.

ciml40I’m here in Marseille thanks to an invitation from Professor Eric Vivier to attend the 2-day scientific conference that the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) have organized as part of their fortieth anniversary celebrations (1976-2016). It starts today (Twitter #CIML40).

Surrounding CIML in the picturesque national park (Parc National des Calanques), just outside the city, are innovative biotech companies focused on immunology and cancer immunotherapy. The combination of companies, research institutes and academic hospitals in the region has created the Marseille Immunopôle (@Immunopole). The area should already be on your radar if you are following the field.

haliodx

Yesterday, I visited HalioDx (@HalioDx), a start-up company a stone’s throw from CIML. It was founded in 2015 to commercialize Immunoscore, a novel biomarker in colon cancer that can be used to stage patients based on their immune response.

Vincent Fert CEO HalioDx

Vincent Fert, CEO of HalioDx

We’ve been following the work of Dr Jérôme Galon on the blog for some time (see posts from European Cancer Congress 2015 and ASCO 2016), so it was a pleasure to talk to Vincent Fert, CEO (pictured right) and co-founder of HalioDx, about his plans to commercialize Immunoscore in Europe and the United States.

If you want to know more about the science behind Immunoscore, do listen to the recent Novel Targets Podcast (@TargetsPodcast) interview with Dr Galon, where he talks about the data he presented at ASCO 2016.

The field of cancer immunotherapy is making rapid progress. It is already reaching the point where — in order to optimize the chance of a durable response — doctors need to know what a patient’s underlying immune response to cancer is, in order to direct therapy.

Vincent Fert and HalioDx are leading the way with the commercialization of a new diagnostic approach for colon cancer based on a patient’s immune profile. He kindly spoke with BSB about his plans for the company and making Immunoscore available in the US and Europe.

haliodx-marseille-luminy

This is the first post in a mini-series from the Marseille Immunopôle.

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Beyond PD-L1 Immunotherapy Biomarkers

Crowds of People at ASCO 2016

The ASCO Wall 2016

There has been much frustration on many fronts at the number of trials that do not see a relationship between PD-L1 expression and response. Some do, but many don’t. This has lead to quite a few investigators suggesting that the IHC assay may not be as useful as originally hoped, for predicting response to checkpoint blockade or selecting patients for therapy.

While we often do see a trend for more responders with higher levels of expression, the main issue is that PD-L1-negative patients can also see some responses, albeit at a lower rate.

There are many factors that can affect the measurement:

  • Fresh vs. archival tissue
  • Heterogeneity within the tumour
  • Tumour cells (TC) vs. immune cells (IC)
  • Different antibodies used for each assay
  • The dynamic nature of the tumour microenvironment – does timing of the biopsy matter?
  • Human error – a pathologist has to eyeball the IHC readouts and decide the level of staining intensity

And so on. These are just a few examples of the factors that can potentially affect the results, making it quite a challenging test to undertake. There is also time – does the level of expression vary temporally depending on which prior therapies are administered?

It would be easy to be disheartened by this, but fear not!

There were some impressive new data presented at ASCO that were not only intriguing, but also show us a way forward on how a multi-factorial approach could be used in different tumour types. By this I mean we might end up with different tests used in conjunction for several different cancers in order to a) predict responders and non-responders and b) better select patients for appropriate regimens or clinical trials.

It’s not going to be as easy as one size (or test) fits all.  Sometimes a more more sophisticated approach will be needed.  New data at ASCO gave us hints on what’s to come in this direction.

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5 Important and Emerging Trends from ASCO 2016

We have selected five key strategic trends that are emerging that will be critical to follow, understand, and even implement if you are on the coal-face of clinical research and new product development.

ASCO16 Chicago 5We aren’t talking about financial things such as cost toxicity, or even how doctors should be paid, but meaty scientific aspects that we need to watch out for. If we are going to improve on cancer research and R&D in the future, these issues will be important.

For companies and academic researchers alike, there is much to learn from the tsunami of data that hit this week if you have a keen interest in the field and a bent for making sense of patterns out of an amorphous mass of data.

Not paying attention to evolution in clinical development can mean the difference between being in the winners circle, on the outside looking in, or falling way behind your competitors. Playing catch up is never anyone’s idea of fun in this market – oncology moves at a lightning fast pace compared to many other therapy areas.

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7 Significant Things I Learned at AACR16 That You Don’t Want to Ignore

UNO SignIn our post AACR analysis, I noticed some consistent observations across multiple talks and informal discussions with thought leaders.

Some of these ideas are pretty important and help us see the big picture for the near and medium term future in the cancer immunotherapy space.

The “Claws” sign we saw at the University of New Orleans sums things up!

Without much ado, it seems a good point to capture and summarise these ideas so that readers can compare notes and debate their thoughts too.

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Future of Cancer Immunotherapy Biomarkers

Biomarkers are a hotly debated topic at the moment within the cancer immunotherapy field.

At the recent Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer annual meeting (SITC 2015), there was even a debate with industry representatives arguing the “pros” and “cons.” Daniel Chen, MD PhD from Genentech (pictured right) argued “pro” and Steven Averbuch MD (pictured left) from BMS argued “con.”

SITC 2015 Biomarker Debate

The challenging question for anyone at the moment is if your Parent, Spouse or Best Friend were PD-L1 negative, would you still want them to receive a PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor (presuming it was indicated for the disease) and have a chance of a response, even if their PD-L1 negativity would suggest only a slim chance of responding?

AT SITC 2015 we spoke with an industry expert who offered insights into a leading company’s biomarker strategy and what the future may look like in 5-7 years time.

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Preview of SITC 2015 Cancer Immunotherapy Meeting

The 30th anniversary meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (Twitter #SITC2015) starts today at National Harbor, MD just outside of Washington DC.

Congratulations to SITC on 30 years of Advancing Cancer Immunotherapy Worldwide!

National Harbor MD SITC

It’s an unusually packed conference season this month with the AACR-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets (#Targets15) meeting in Boston unfortunately clashing with SITC 2015.  In previous years, the Triple meeting has been held in late October, something we hope it will return to in future.

Many of the leading cancer immunologists are at National Harbor…

In our latest conference preview post, we’ve taken a quick look at some of the late breaker and poster abstracts of note and will cover the main oral presentations at the end of each day, so do check back daily for more news and views.

As subscribers already know, we generally provide most of our commentary and analysis after a meeting when we’ve had a chance to hear the data, “kick the tyres” and talk to researchers. However, for those who can’t be at SITC, we will be writing a “top-line”post at the end of each day to give you a flavor of what’s hot at SITC 2015 and our initial impressions of the data we heard.

We typically generate a separate page for each conference we cover, so you can find the SITC 2015 coverage here; it includes some additional posts that make for background reading.

Wednesday’s program at National Harbor starts off with a Global Regulatory Summit (which we’ll miss due to travel) and an International Symposium on Cancer Immunotherapy later in the afternoon.

The weather looks like it’s going to be quite delightful at National Harbor – hopefully the meeting room won’t be as frigid as last year – and in addition to the great science, we’re look forward to meeting up with those of our subs who are here too!

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Overcoming acquired resistance to EGFR therapies in colorectal cancer

Continuing our series on the ASCO GI meeting, today marks the end of the conference coverage with an interesting look at overcoming resistance to EGFR therapies such as Erbitux and Vectibix.

One of the hallmarks of EGFR monotherapy in colorectal cancer is stable disease with eventual relapse, but few dramatic responses. This suggests that other factors may play a role in driving oncogenic activity.

Dr Tejpar, Leuven

Dr Tejpar, Leuven

Recently, patient derived xenografts (PDX) have begun to play an increasingly important role in helping to understand the biology of the disease and facilitate improved trial design.

Earlier this week, we discussed the molecular characterisation of the disease based on the keynote talk by Dr Sabine Tejpar. Her group in Belgium as well as others in Italy and Spain have been very active in European translational work in this area to identify and map the pathways influencing EGFR therapy in GI cancers.

What can we learn from the latest findings in this space?

The answer may well surprise you.

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Insights from AACR on immunotherapy and checkpoint inhibitors

Today, I’m going to summarise some of my notes on what we learned about lung cancer and immunotherapy at AACR. The burgeoning immuno-oncology topic is way too big to do justice in one single post, so over the next couple of days, you’ll find a mini series evolving here on BSB to cover many of the points relating to checkpoint inhibitors from AACR. It was the first time in 15 years I’ve seen immunotherapy dominate a basic scientific meeting and it was good to see it happen. It is definitely very much the focus – and excitement – of many major cancer centres in the US.

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Update on anti-PD-L1 cancer immunotherapy

In the second part of our mini-series on immuno-oncology, I thought it would be a nice idea to share a recent interview conducted with one of Roche/Genentech’s leading researchers in this field.  I was particularly interested in their approach because while BMS and Merck have clearly focused on anti-PD-1, Roche and Genentech have effectively zigged with their development of an anti-PD-L1 inhibitor.  Does this matter?

Here, we explore the general background to this approach and, in particular, where the company are going with their anti-PD-L1 inhibitor, MPDL3280A.

Topics discussed:

anti-PD-L1, anti-PD-1, anti-CTLA-4, checkpoint point inhibitors, T cells, biomarkers.

Drugs mentioned:

MPDL3280A, nivolumab, MK-3475, ipilimumab (Yervoy), lirilumab, BMS-986016 (anti-LAG3), bevacizumab (Avastin), erlotinib (Tarceva), vemurafenib (Zelboraf), cobimetinib.

If you are interested in more background on how the PD-1 and PD-L1 inhibitors work, you can check out the mechanism of action (MOA) in our video preview from ASCO last year, which explains this in fairly simple terms.

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