What You Should Know:
– OncoHost, a company pioneering personalized medicine approaches for better patient outcomes, announced a collaborative research study with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a leading cancer treatment and research center.
– The project aims to identify biomarkers in blood for renal cell carcinoma (RCC), a type of kidney cancer.
The Challenge of Personalized Treatment for RCC:
While immune-checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy has revolutionized RCC treatment, these therapies can have drawbacks. They can trigger immune-related side effects and may not be effective for all patients. This research collaboration aims to address this challenge by identifying biomarkers that can predict a patient’s response to ICI therapy.
Leveraging Expertise and Resources:
The project leverages the strengths of both institutions. Dana-Farber provides a rich resource of patient plasma samples and corresponding clinical data. OncoHost will use this data to create a proteomic plasma profile of metastatic RCC patients before treatment.
The project study has several key objectives:
- Identify protein expression changes: Researchers will associate changes in protein expression with treatment response metrics, such as overall survival, progression-free survival, and best response.
- Predict differential responses: The study aims to develop a method to predict how patients will respond to specific treatment combinations.
- Explore treatment pathways: Researchers will investigate the proteomic pathways associated with both treatment response and immune-related side effects. This could provide valuable insights into treatment options and resistance mechanisms.
- Compare with other cancers: The research will compare RCC’s unique biomolecular landscape with pathways identified in the PROPHETIC trial (NCT04056247) for other cancers.
Improving RCC Treatment Outcomes:
By identifying biomarkers for RCC, this research collaboration has the potential to significantly improve treatment outcomes for kidney cancer patients. Patients will be able to receive more personalized treatment plans, potentially leading to better efficacy and reduced side effects.
"We are excited to collaborate with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute on this important research study," said Ofer Sharon, MD, CEO of OncoHost. "As we enter the era of precision medicine, validated biomarkers are increasingly used to guide treatment decisions and uncover resistance pathways in various types of tumors. However, RCC lacks reliable biomarkers to predict ICI response. Our goal is to overcome this challenge to improve clinical decision-making in the first line setting and, ultimately, patient outcomes."
