IsoPlexis Announces Research Collaboration with Nektar Therapeutics

IsoPlexis Corporation (IsoPlexis), a privately held life sciences company at the forefront of single-cell analytics technology, announced its collaboration with Nektar Therapeutics. The collaboration is focused on further defining the functional impact of NKTR-214 in the clinic, at the single-cell level, with the goal of revealing both mechanism and potential immune correlates with outcome.

Recently, preclinical data captured by IsoPlexis’ IsoCode Chip in a study led by UCLA (AACR 2018) provided evidence that Nektar’s cytokine agonist NKTR-214 can significantly boost the activation of critical T cell subsets, termed polyfunctional T cells, in combination with adoptive cell transfer (ACT) therapies.

Through this collaboration, IsoPlexis will employ its IsoCode Chip’s single-cell functional profiling in collaboration with Nektar Therapeutics to profile the effects of NKTR-214 in both monotherapy and combination immunotherapy in a clinical setting. IsoPlexis’ platform has previously highlighted the potential of polyfunctional T cells, those cells secreting multiple cytokines, as a promising correlate to clinical patient outcome in a variety of immunotherapies.

“We are excited to collaborate with Nektar Therapeutics and further demonstrate the broad impact of NKTR-214 and its ability to induce critical T cell responses in cancer immunotherapy,” said IsoPlexis Chief Executive Officer, Sean Mackay. “We recently released pre-clinical data highlighting the ability of NKTR-214 to activate key subsets of highly functional immune cells, and look forward to further profile the therapy’s immune-based mechanisms and correlates in the clinic.”

“We see potential in utilizing IsoPlexis’ single-cell system to help provide deeper resolution into the functional impacts of our therapeutics,” said Jon Zalevsky, Chief Scientific Officer of Nektar Therapeutics. “This collaboration will enable us to apply the sensitivity of this solution to further our understanding of patient-specific responses to our immune therapies.”

The IsoCode Chip, used on the IsoLight Platform, provides an integrated solution for detecting functional cellular responses with single-cell resolution. The system can capture a previously unseen 42 different secreted functional proteins per cell, across thousands of single cells simultaneously. IsoPlexis’ IsoSpeak informatics software enables researchers to generate a precise, functional patient profile from this data to better understand and predict complex patient response to cancer immunotherapies.