Predicting cancer immunotherapy response

IRX Therapeutics, a US bioresearch company developing cancer immunotherapies, and ImmunID, a French immune molecular diagnostics company, have entered into a collaboration to predict patients’ response to the IRX-2 immunotherapy candidate using the ImmunTraCkeR assay.

IRX-2 is a primary cell-derived biologic with multiple active cytokine components that acts on multiple cell types of the immune system. A randomised phase 2b study has been designed to determine whether neoadjuvant treatment with IRX-2 in newly diagnosed head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC) beginning before curative surgery can reduce the risk of recurrence.

ImmunTraCkeR, meanwhile, evaluates a patient’s immune status from a simple liquid biopsy (5 mL EDTA blood), based on T lymphocyte repertoire diversity. The new collaboration will see ImmunTraCkeR used on patients from IRX’s phase 2b study to: understand their pre-existing immunity; monitor T-cell diversity over time in order to assess immune-modulatory effect of IRX-2; and make a preliminary assessment of ImmunTraCkeR acting as a predictor of response to IRX-2.

“ImmunTraCkeR will help to characterise the patient immune status and may help to select those highly likely to respond to IRX-2, thus widening its clinical value as a general immune companion diagnostics assay,” explained ImmunID Chairman and CEO Dr Bernhard Sixt.

“This collaboration will provide an insight into T-cell diversity in patients treated with our novel immune-modulator, IRX-2, and the correlation with response to the treatment over time,” added IRX Therapeutics CEO John W Hadden II. “We believe that ImmunID’s ImmunTraCkeR assay may provide deeper insight into the clinical results we have generated to date and provide a companion diagnostic to our novel cancer treatment in the future.”