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UK Consortium Launches With Public-Private Funding to ID Immunotherapy Biomarkers

NEW YORK – The Francis Crick Institute and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust on Sunday announced the formation of a new consortium that will conduct research to better understand how cancer patients respond to immunotherapies, the side effects they experience, and how readily they can access these treatments in the UK. 

The research program, called the Multiomic Analysis of Immunotherapy Features Evidencing Success and Toxicity, or MANIFEST for short, is funded by both the government and industry. The UK government's Medical Research Council and Office for Life Sciences has put £9 million ($11.8 million) into the project, and industry partners have contributed £12.9 million. 

Members of the consortium will identify and validate biomarkers that can predict how cancer patients are likely to respond to immunotherapy, including genetic biomarkers, chemical signals from immune cells, the location of immune cells relative to patients' tumors, immune cell profiles, and gut microbiome composition. They will also develop new tests to monitor patients' outcomes and responses throughout treatment. During the four-year project, researchers will collect data from patients' blood, stool, and tumor tissue. 

The MANIFEST consortium comprises 16 academic institutions, 11 industry partners, 12 networks, and three patient organizations. Major drugmakers including AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Merck, among others, are involved as collaborators, as are several genomics and molecular diagnostics firms, including Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Roche, Guardant Health, Natera, 10x Genomics, and Akoya Biosciences. 

The London-based firm IMU Biosciences, one of the firms that has signed on as a member of the MANIFEST consortium, will use its machine-learning platform to analyze several thousand blood samples from patients receiving immunotherapy. In doing so, they hope to predict treatment responses based on the immune cells in patients' blood. 

The program is launching with samples and data from 3,000 cancer patients who've completed treatment and 3,000 patients who are just starting treatment. Initially, the researchers will focus on studying how patients with breast cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, and melanoma respond to immunotherapy and the toxicities they experience. Ultimately, they hope to expand their research to other types of cancers.