Webinar

In this presentation, from the 2021 Spatial Biology Europe Congress, Gavin Gordon, Ph.D., Vice President, Clinical Market Development from Akoya Biosciences describes evolving biomarker strategies in immuno-oncology and how multiplexed immunofluorescence has been associated with improved predictive performance. Dr Sebastian Marwitz, ARCN Principal Investigator, Pathology from Research Center Borstel – Leibniz Lung Center, describes how multiplexed IHC has been used for the spatial profiling in lung disease in hypotheses-driven analyses at a cohort level using FFPE patient samples.

In today’s clinical research laboratories, available tissue samples are both smaller in size and more in demand for a variety of assays to help researchers make informed decisions and spatial discoveries. The very cornerstone of tissue histopathology – the H&E stain – is the first crucial step to help map out the morphological landscape. Here, Akoya Biosciences describes a technique in which a tissue sample is stained with a modified H&E stain prior to the application of an Opal Multiplex assay on the same slide, as a screening tool and efficient and effective way to maximize your precious samples.

Dr. Yvonne Saenger, from the Columbia University Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses how she used a validated quantitative multiplex immunofluroescence imaging workflow to identify individuals who would respond to adjuvant immunotherapy, better stratifying them into high-risk versus low-risk stage II melanoma.

In this talk, Dr. Alexander “Sandy” Borowsky will share preliminary results of an ongoing biomarker discovery study on breast cancer cohorts, including those participating in the I-SPY 2 trial, and how the in situ analysis of the tumor microenvironment is critical to understanding immunotherapy response. The I-SPY 2 trial: Neoadjuvant and Personalized Adaptive Novel Agents to Treat Breast Cancer was launched by UCSF in collaboration with a private-public partnership to improve efficiency of breast cancer clinical trials and streamline the development of new drugs. Breast cancers, overall, infrequently respond to immunotherapy. And immunotherapies, which harness the immune system to fight cancer, are being used in the early high-risk treatment setting. However, individual tumors show dramatic variation in patterns of the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) with both immune “cold” and inflamed phenotypes. We hypothesized that the TIME pattern might predict responses to immunotherapy and/or prognosis/outcomes. We examined the TIME of high-risk invasive breast cancer and high-risk non-invasive ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), hypothesizing that immune evasion might be one of the critical steps in progression of DCIS to invasive carcinoma. Leveraging current clinical trials, we have performed gene expression analyses (bulk) and multiplexed-immunohistochemistry (mIHC). We have optimized two 7-color assay panels using the Opal detection and artificial intelligence-assisted image analysis to provide specific cell segmented assignment of location and applied proximity analyses for cell-cell interaction assessment. These data show distinct differences in the TIME and reveal predictions of early response.