Jennifer Ribeiro, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology (Research) at Brown University and Women & Infants speaks about the New Data Published from Women & Infants Hospital Demonstrate Utility of Predictive Immune Modeling in Ovarian Cancer.
Link to Article:
https://cofactorgenomics.reportablenews.com/pr/new-data-published-from-women-infants-hospital
March 8, 2021 "“ PROVIDENCE, R.I. "“ Cofactor Genomics, the company bridging the precision medicine gap, announced today that Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island reported new data in Frontiers in Oncology1. The findings demonstrate the value of Cofactor’s Predictive Immune Modeling technology in elucidating the immune environment of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) for the creation of immunotherapies and identifying prognostic indicators of response to frontline chemotherapy.
In the United States, EOC is the most deadly of all gynecological malignancies, with more than 21,000 diagnoses and almost 14,000 deaths predicted in 2020.
2 Several EOC clinical trials are currently underway; however, although immune checkpoint inhibitors such as cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated protein-4 (CTLA-4) or programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) have shown great promise in melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients, EOC patients have only seen response rates of 10 to 15%. 4 Despite the low response rates, evidence indicates that EOC is an immunogenic cancer5,6, and the team led by Jennifer Ribeiro, Ph.D. at Women & Infants Hospital outlined how these findings pave the way for the production of better immunotherapy agents in the paper.
The authors used the Cofactor Genomics ImmunoPrism® tool to test a cohort of high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) tumors in order to find an immune-related gene expression model that could be used to predict response to frontline chemotherapy. They discovered that HGSOC patients with longer progression-free survival have higher levels of the immunological markers CTLA-4, LAG-3, and Treg immune cells (PFS). They also looked at which immunological features in a tumor were related to better outcomes, which may contribute to new immunotherapeutic approaches. The researchers also discovered that ICOS was substantially higher in expression in patients with a longer PFS and that it was closely linked to CTLA-4, PD-1, and unique subsets of immune cell infiltration. High ICOS and LAG-3 levels were also significantly correlated with longer survival in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) ovarian cancer dataset, supporting the findings from the tumor cohort.
The research builds on Cofactor’s previous work identifying novel immune signals in other disease indications, such as sarcoma, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and recurrent and metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck, using its Predictive Immune Modeling technology (RM-HNSCC). In addition, the organization has published a list of disease priorities for diagnostic progress and is currently pursuing clinical partners: https://clinical.cofactorgenomics.com/