Lunaphore announces the winners of the 2023 SPYRE™ Immuno-Oncology (IO) Grant Program

LAUSANNE, Switzerland – May 25, 2023 – 4:00 pm (CEST) – Lunaphore, a Swiss life sciences company developing technology to enable spatial biology in every laboratory, today announced Dr. Olivier Pardo at the Imperial College London; and Dr. Nicholas Weaver, Dr. Kathleen Pfaff,  Dr. Scott Rodig, at Dana Farber Cancer Institute as the winners of the 2023 SPYRE™ Immuno-Oncology Grant Program. The Imperial College London’s research teams will use the COMET™ and SPYRE™ IO Core Antibody Panel to explore the role of RSK4 protein kinase in modulating immune recruitment in osteosarcoma, and Dana Farber Cancer Institute’s researchers will aim to advance understanding of the differences in the tumor immune microenvironments (TIME).

In support of Lunaphore’s mission of making spatial biology mainstream, the company’s unique program was established to further lower the barriers to adoption and advance spatial research by awarding a sample testing project on the COMET™ platform, using any desired SPYRE™ Antibody Panel. COMET™ is the only fully automated, high-throughput, hyperplex platform ensuring scalability and reproducibility without the need to conjugate primary antibodies, making panel design much more flexible and faster than any other hyperplex solution. The new SPYRE™ Antibody Panel kits were designed to support researchers in biomarker identification and validation, allowing scientists to kick-start assay development and enable users with verified biomarkers on COMET™.

 

Grant Winners:

Imperial College London

Project title: Investigating the role of RSK4 in modulating immune recruitment in osteosarcoma

Project leader: Dr. Olivier Pardo, Principal Investigator and Senior Lecturer

Project description:

Osteosarcoma (OS), the most prevalent form of primary bone cancer, presents a significant therapeutic challenge due to its high mortality rates at advanced stages (30% survival at five years), highlighting an urgent and unmet need for effective treatments. A previous study¹ from Dr. Pardo’s lab demonstrated RSK4 as important modulator of TIME as its inhibition prevents drug resistance and metastasis in lung and bladder cancer cells. These findings were reproduced in other cancers, including OS. The analysis on the COMET™ platform with the SPYRE™ IO-Core Antibody Panel will investigate the composition of the tumor microenvironment in tissue samples from OS patients in the presence or absence of RSK4 expression.

 

Dana Farber Cancer Institute

Project title: Evaluating the differences in the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) of patients with distinct genetic subtypes of non-Hodgkin diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL)

Project leader:   Dr. Nicholas Weaver, Scientist; Dr. Kathleen Pfaff, Principal  Scientist; Dr. Scott Rodig, Tissue Biomarker Laboratory Director;

Project description:

Dr. Weaver’s project will use the COMET™ platform and SPYRE™ IO Core Antibody Panel to probe the TIME in sections of a tissue microarray with a triplicate sampling of biopsies from patients with clinically, pathologically, and genetically annotated DLBCL. The hyperplex capabilities of COMET™ will help to investigate whether spatial cell relationships can be linked to the response to therapy. Discovering spatial differences could then be further explored for clinical prognostic markers or novel mechanistic findings that may advance existing and novel immunotherapies.

 

Lunaphore recognizes the high quality of the applications received and would like to thank all the applicants for their strong interest in this program.

To learn more about Lunaphore, please visit: www.lunaphore.com/

 

Reference:

1. Chrysostomou S, et al. Repurposed floxacins targeting RSK4 prevent chemoresistance and metastasis in lung and bladder cancer. Sci Transl Med. 2021. 13(602): eaba4627. doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aba462

 

 

About Lunaphore

Lunaphore Technologies S.A. is a Swiss company born in 2014 with the vision of enabling spatial biology in every laboratory. Lunaphore provides solutions based on a game-changing chip technology that can extract spatial proteomic and transcriptomic data from tumors and other tissues, transforming any assay into multiplex spatial biology through a streamlined and easily integrated process. Lunaphore empowers researchers in immunology, immuno-oncology, and neuroscience to push the boundaries of scientific discovery and drug development. Lunaphore’s technology enables the identification of biomarker “signatures” with clinical relevance to support the development of diagnostic tools and streamline clinical trials, to ultimately improve patient outcomes. For further information on Lunaphore and its products, please visit https://lunaphore.com.

About COMET™

COMET™ is the only fully automated, high-throughput, hyperplex platform ensuring scalability and reproducibility without the need to conjugate primary antibodies. COMET™ provides walk-away automation, integrating staining, imaging, and image preprocessing steps to obtain standard hyperplex images. COMET™ generates highly robust and reproducible data with full tissue preservation, allowing researchers to perform downstream modalities such as H&E or transcriptomics using the same slide. Its superior tissue profiling capabilities facilitate the analysis of 40 different spatial markers in each automated run on a tissue slide. In contrast to other spatial biology solutions, COMET™ works with off-the-shelf, label-free primary antibodies, making panel design much more flexible and faster than any other hyperplex solution. COMET™ works with regular glass slides from standard histology workflows; it is validated for human and mouse samples and is compatible with any other animal sample. The platform can be used for a wide range of research applications, allowing for a dramatic improvement in the understanding of disease pathology. Orders of the new COMET™ version can be placed and will be available for shipment in the upcoming months. To learn more about the COMET™ platform, please visit: https://lunaphore.com/products/comet/

About SPYRE™ Antibody Panel kits

The four SPYRE™ Antibody Panel kits – Immuno-Oncology, Immune, TIL, and T cell Core Panel – lay the foundation of Lunaphore’s primary antibody offering and establish the basis for the immuno-oncology reagent portfolio. The assays developed with these kits can be modified or expanded with additional off-the-shelf antibodies from the customer’s own library to build custom panels for specific research needs without complexity. The primary antibody offering also includes Panel Builder, an online application providing exclusive access to a library of more than 70 successfully tested off-the-shelf markers and over 300 protocols. It provides an intuitive and convenient way to combine antibodies with SPYRE™ Antibody Panels to create panel protocols in silico, allowing ready-to-use COMET™ hyperplex protocols to be automatically generated in a few clicks. Orders of SPYRE™ Antibody Panel kits can be placed and will be available for shipment by the summer. To learn more about SPYRE™ Antibody Panels, please visit: https://lunaphore.com/spyre-antibody-panels/

 

For further information contact:

Irene Tamayo
Lunaphore Corporate Communications
Email: [email protected]