NEW YORK – Tempus announced on Thursday a collaboration with TScan Therapeutics to develop a companion diagnostic test to prospectively assess human leukocyte antigen (HLA) loss in patients' tumors.
The test would support TScan's screening protocol for its Phase I solid tumor clinical trial that is designed to enable customized mixtures of T-cell receptor engineered T-cell therapies (TCR-Ts) that are administered to patients based on tumor antigen positivity and intact HLA expression, Tempus said in a statement.
TScan plans to enroll patients with solid tumors including non-small cell lung cancer, melanoma, head and neck cancer, ovarian cancer, and cervical cancer. The biopharmaceutical company will use Tempus' xT assay, a 648-gene sequencing panel, to prospectively identify patients with HLA loss in the tumor to select TCR-Ts that can recognize intact HLS genes, Tempus said.
"Utilizing the assay developed in collaboration with Tempus will help determine if the clinical trial participants' tumors have undergone partial HLA loss and so will enable us to choose the most appropriate TCR-Ts that are customized for the patient's tumor antigens and preserved HLA genes," TScan Chief Medical Officer Debora Barton said in a statement.
"This CDx work is unique because we're looking for information that's not currently in the list of readouts you typically receive from next-generation sequencing of a solid tumor," Tempus Executive VP Michael Yasiejko said in a statement. "Tempus is uniquely positioned to develop a custom pipeline to extract information from standard tests that need to guide TCR-T therapy development and ultimately help identify patients that may benefit from these therapies."