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NIH collaboration aims to identify, validate immunotherapy biomarkers
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NIH launched the Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies, a 5-year public-private research collaboration.
The $215 million effort is part of the national cancer moonshot initiative.
The collaboration — managed by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and advised by the FDA — will focus on efforts to identify, develop and validate robust biomarkers to advance new immunotherapy treatments for cancer care.
“The purpose is to find better ways to predict which patients may benefit from such therapies, and to design new approaches for those who don’t,” Sacha Gnjatic, PhD, associate professor at The Tisch Cancer Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told HemOnc Today. “The partnership takes advantage of the large-scale funding and portfolios of drugs from the pharmaceutical industry to tap into the expertise of NCI-sponsored researchers and clinicians and solve these questions in the most scientifically robust manner.”
In conjunction with 11 biopharmaceutical companies, the Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies will facilitate systematic and uniform clinical testing of biomarkers to evaluate the mechanisms of response and resistance to cancer therapy.
“Cancer drugs based on modulating the immune system have many mechanisms of action, because immunity acts in a coordinated fashion between innate and adaptive responses,” Gnjatic said. “This makes it harder to know why some patients respond and why some don’t, because it is unlikely that a single mechanism is responsible for this complex cascade of events.”
Participating biopharmaceutical companies include AbbVie, Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceutical, Novartis and Pfizer.
In addition, NCI awarded cooperative agreements — worth a total of $53.6 million in funding over 5 years — to support four Cancer Immune Monitoring and Analysis Centers and a Cancer Immunologic Data Commons.
The NCI cooperative agreements have been awarded to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Stanford Cancer Institute, Precision Immunology Institute and The Tisch Cancer Institute.
The four NCI-awarded institutions will form a network of laboratory centers to support adult and pediatric immunotherapy trials designed to perform deep tumor and immune profiling.
The collaboration will enable consistent generation of data, uniform assays to support data reproducibility, comparability of data across trials, and validation of new biomarkers for immunotherapy regimens.
Lastly, the Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies will use the Cancer Immunologic Data Commons to facilitate information sharing by all stakeholders.
“Although the clinical development of new cancer immunotherapy drugs can only be done with the resources of biotech and pharmaceutical companies because of the enormous costs of running clinical trials, far too often, studies are designed without proper means to understand the biological mechanisms underpinning the effectiveness of experimental agents,” Gnjatic said. “This cancer moonshot/NCI initiative realizes that just measuring tumor growth and survival leaves too many questions unanswered, and that immune monitoring of samples from patients in these clinical trials is the most rational way to quickly make progress.” – by Kristie L. Kahl
For more information:
Sacha Gnjatic, PhD, can be reached at sacha.gnjatic@mssm.edu.