ImmunID, the immune companion diagnostics for precision medicine company, announced it has been awarded Small Business Research Initiative funding by UK's innovation agency, Innovate UK, to advance its ImmunTraCkeR assay for therapeutic response prediction.

The project aims at validating ImmunID's clinical results with ImmunTraCkeR through a clinical study on 40 metastatic melanoma patients from the UK, treated with immunotherapy. It also includes a medico-economic study to measure the health economic benefits for the National Health Service (NHS), the UK healthcare system. The National Institute for Health Research Diagnostic Evidence Co-operative Leeds (NIHR DEC Leeds) and the Precision Medicine Catapult are collaborating on the project. The Catapult's Centres of Excellence in Leeds and Glasgow will provide health-informatic and data-analytic support to mine local and national health records, providing real world NHS data for the economic modelling. Ultimately, ImmunTraCkeR may be used as an immune companion diagnostic to immune checkpoint agents and help doctors make informed decisions regarding the treatment of melanoma, therefore improving patient benefit whilst saving unnecessary healthcare costs.

The project will be focused on the prediction by ImmunTraCkeR of patient response to novel immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs (anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD1) in metastatic melanoma. ImmunTraCkeR analyses the diversity of T cells, the targets of immune checkpoint inhibitors, present in a patient's blood and therefore can help determine whether the patient is immunologically fit for treatment with these agents.

"The United Kingdom is a global role model when it comes to helping patients access the most appropriate treatments while making the best use of healthcare resources. This is the challenge of the future and our mission. Hence we are pleased to work with the NIHR DEC Leeds and the Precision Medicine Catapult in this immune checkpoint inhibitors programme and thank Innovate UK for their support. Our key priority is to show that ImmunTraCkeR is the tool to identify patients who benefit and to guide doctors through a maze of immunotherapy choices in the future. We believe that this program has the potential to demonstrate medico-economic benefit not only for the UK but globally," said Dr. Bernhard Sixt, chairman and chief executive officer of ImmunID.

Professor Peter Selby, professor of cancer medicine at the University of Leeds and director of the NIHR Diagnostic Evidence Cooperative Leeds, said, "We are delighted to be part of this team receiving funding from Innovate UK for this project. It represents an exciting opportunity to confirm that a new molecular test of a patient's immune function can guide us in selecting patients for a new cancer therapy. This could give us a radically improved ability to benefit many patients while avoiding unnecessary side effects in others."

John McKinley, CEO of the Precision Medicine Catapult, added, "With our focus on making precision medicine a reality in the UK, we are delighted to collaborate with ImmunID and the NIHR DEC Leeds in this area of unmet medical need. Generation of information on how precision medicine can improve healthcare outcomes in a cost-effective way is an important step towards its adoption into routine practice. This collaboration, involving the Precision Medicine Catapult's Centres of Excellence and a European company, shows how we can leverage UK infrastructure and collaborate internationally to drive patient benefit."

"TCR diversity evaluation as a predictive biomarker of response to immunotherapy" was selected by Innovate UK in the "Stratified Medicine: connecting the UK infrastructure" competition.