San Francisco, October 30, 2018 -- Cofactor Genomics, a clinical RNA sequencing and translational assay developer, announced today the launch of a RNA-based immune profiling kit developed for laboratories wishing to derive the immune composition of tumor samples. The tumor’s immune composition is proving to be a valuable indicator of response to current immunotherapies and the numerous drugs in development. Using the ImmunoPrismTM Immune Profiling Kit, laboratories now have access to the same kit Cofactor Genomics uses to prep, sequence and analyze against Cofactor’s database of machine-learning optimized immune reference expression models. The launch of the kit follows recent ImmunoPrismTM announcements on collaborations with The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and most recently, the clinical accreditation of the assay by the College of American Pathologists within Cofactor’s CAP/CLIA lab.
“The recent advancements in immunotherapies have resulted in more than 500 drug and combination clinical trials - significantly more trials than there are patients to fill them. Improved tools are needed to provide immune profiling of our tumors, with the goal to ultimately match the right patients with the right trials,” said Scott Kopetz, M.D., Ph.D., FACP, Department of Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology, Division of Cancer Medicine Division, MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Cofactor’s COO, David Messina, will introduce the technology during a talk entitled, “A kit enabling robust quantification of difficult-to-detect immune cell types in your laboratory’s challenging clinical samples,” sponsored by Illumina, at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) taking place in Washington, DC, at the Marriott Marquis - Chinatown Room on Thursday, November 8, 2018 at 7 PM.
“Cofactor Genomics’ ImmunoPrism kit provides scientists access to Cofactor’s innovation in RNA-based molecular immune profiling. These are not single gene measurements to generate ambiguous estimates of enrichment — these are quantitative measures of specific immune cells in the sampled tumor microenvironment derived from Cofactor’s database of reference immune expression models,” said Jarret Glasscock, PhD, founder and chief executive officer. “Our team’s decades of leadership in RNA profiling underscore Cofactor’s commitment to improving human health through the science of RNA.”
About the ImmunoPrism Immune Profiling Reagent Kit
Building on data from thousands of RNA expression profiles, the fully analyzed, proprietary, biomarker discovery report includes quantitative immune cell characterizations and enables intra- and inter-sample immune cell ratios and comparisons, which have been shown to have prognostic value. The report also includes statistics such as p-value, threshold for patient selection, predictive accuracy, and positive/negative predictive values.
Cofactor’s ImmunoPrismTM Immune Profiling Kit reports on the most impactful immune modulatory molecules demonstrated to have implications in drug discovery, biomarker development and immunotherapy efficacy prediction. Specifically, ImmunoPrismTM details the quantitative percentage for eight major immune cell types and expression levels of ten immune escape genes. This immune characterization can be obtained using FFPE, FNAs, CNBs, accommodating solid tumors with very limited amounts of tissue, in some cases as low as 20 nanograms. This includes pre-treatment clinical samples, which previously have been difficult to characterize.
To learn more about the ImmunoPrismTM Immune Profiling Reagent Kit, visit https://cofactorgenomics.com/immunoprism-assay, or call (888) 602-0448 to speak with a sales representative.
About Cofactor Genomics
Cofactor Genomics uses RNA to help researchers and clinicians understand, diagnose, and predict drug response for the 95% of disease that can’t be assessed by DNA alone. Founded by three former Human Genome Project scientists, Cofactor has built a database of multidimensional gene expression models and a proprietary platform capable of overcoming the chemical and computational challenges of performing complex characterization of clinical-grade human samples. Cofactor has contracts to provide RNA sequencing and analysis services to the research arms of eight of the world’s largest pharma and biotech companies and is in the process of commercializing a suite of clinical diagnostic assays. Find out more about Cofactor Genomics at cofactorgenomics.com.
