Numerous companies within immune-oncology have been founded in the past years, while existing large companies have increasingly turned their attention to this field, aiming to manipulate patients’ immune system to fight cancer in different ways.
Some of the most advanced treatments in the clinical process are checkpoint inhibitor antibodies and chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) T or T-cell receptor (TCR) transduced cell therapies. However, these are associated with cross-reactivity and safety issues.
Several of these treatments previously induced fatal side effects due to cross-reactivity of the TCR to unrelated tissues. ImmuMap’s academic collaborator, professor and key opinion leader Sine Reker Hadrup’s group at the Danish Technical University recently established several assays based on flow cytometry and next-generation sequencing for measuring alloreactivity and elucidating the so-called TCR fingerprint to overcome this.
Their front-line work is published in Nature Biotechnology this month.
ImmuMap’s CEO Thomas M. Frøsig said: “We are now established on the market with several returning customers. We look forward to expanding into offering a safety package including the TCR fingerprinting platform together with a functional readout for new clients by moving into this area, while in parallel continuing our work within immune monitoring, phenotyping, activation and antigen-specificity”.
For further information about the TCR fingerprinting platform, please see Amalie K Bentzen et al. Nature Biotechnology volume 36, pages 1191–1196 (2018).