Advaxis and Personalis Announce Research Agreement to Deploy ImmunoID NeXT Platform in the ADXS-503 Clinical Program
Advaxis, Inc. and Personalis Inc. announced a collaboration to leverage Personalis’ ImmunoID NeXT Platform in Advaxis’ ongoing Phase 1/2 ADXS-503 (HOT Lung) program evaluating ADXS-503 alone and in combination with pembrolizumab in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The ADXS-503 construct targets 11 public or shared, hotspot neoantigens in KRAS, EGFR and TP53 as well as 11 proprietary tumor-associated antigen targets. Under the terms of the expanded agreement, Personalis will conduct comprehensive tumor immunogenomic profiling to enable the identification of predictive composite biomarkers and/or signatures of response, as well as the broad evaluation of potential mechanisms of therapy resistance.
Via the deep analysis of ~20,000 genes in both DNA and RNA, ImmunoID NeXT consolidates multiple biomarker assays into one; providing a multidimensional view of the tumor and the immune microenvironment from a single sample. The platform is an end-to-end solution for immuno- and precision oncology biomarker discovery and CDx development.
“We are thrilled to expand our relationship with Personalis and believe the resulting analyses may lead to the establishment of predictive biomarkers and the characterization of immunological impact of treatment which will be relevant to the successful development of ADXS-503 and our other off-the-shelf neoantigen constructs,” said Dr. Andres A. Gutierrez, Chief Medical Officer of Advaxis. “With the emerging clinical signals we are seeing in our ongoing ADXS-503 clinical study and the extensive capabilities of ImmunoID NeXT to interrogate a patient’s tumor and immune response at both the DNA- and RNA-level from a single FFPE tissue sample, the analysis will help guide our development plans in order to target the right patient population and to potentially increase the clinical benefit of our off-the-shelf, ADXS-HOT drug constructs.”
This new agreement builds upon the prior two-year collaboration between Advaxis and Personalis for the genomic analysis of clinical tumor samples to manufacture the Company’s ADXS-NEO drug construct, its personalized, neoantigen-directed immunotherapy to treat a variety of late stage cancers. As previously published, the ADXS-NEO drug constructs were able to efficiently generate de novo CD8+ T cells versus KRAS and EGFR hotspot mutations in late stage-cancer patients, thus providing proof-of-mechanism for our ADXS-HOT program.