The key to treating one of the world’s deadliest cancers may be found in DNA. That’s the latest from Mission Bio, a leading life science company, which today announced that its Tapestri Platform has been successfully used to identify disease-driving clones in multiple myeloma (MM).
MM has long been the focus of precision therapy development. But new data from Mission Bio suggests that a technology known as single-cell multi-omics can help better identify MM and inform treatment.
About MM
MM is a blood cancer originating from bone marrow. Specifically, it’s a cancer of the plasma cells – white blood cells responsible for the creation of antibodies that protect the body from infection.
MM causes the cells to grow rapidly and crowd out the body’s normal cells in the bone marrow that make red blood cells, platelets, and other white blood cells.
This process is painful, as the bones weaken, making MM patients prone to breaks from simple, daily activity.
Historically, a bleak prognosis
Multiple myeloma carries the grim distinction of a 100% relapse rate and a five-year survival rate of only 54%.
According to the American Society of Clinical Oncology, 176,404 people worldwide were diagnosed with MM in 2020, and in the same year 117,077 people died from the disease.
Single-cell multiomics 101
Single-cell multiomics technologies are devices that measure multiple types of molecules from the same individual cell. The information gleaned from this process allows for greater biological insight than by simply evaluating each molecular layer from separate cells.
The Tapestri Platform
Mission Bio’s Tapestri Platform, a single-cell multiomics technology, encompasses both the Tapestri Instrument and software for data analysis and visualization. Combined, these tools provide detailed information on clonal evolution and potential therapeutic targets at a single-cell level.
According to Mission Bio, such insights into MM – as well as other cancers, such as acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and other blood cancers – “could augment, or even replace, multiple other assays that each provide only a fraction of the patient’s disease characteristics.”
A breakthrough in the treatment of MM
Recently, MM data generated from a proof-of-concept project using the Tapestri Platform was presented at the 13th World Clinical Biomarkers & CDx Summit and the 20th International Myeloma Society Annual Meeting and Exposition.
Todd Druley, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer of Mission Bio, and Adam Sciambi, PhD, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Mission Bio, presented the data generated by Hervé Avet-Loiseau, MD, PhD from The Cancer Research Center of Toulouse and Genentech’s Director of Translational Medicine, Cedric Dos Santos, PhD.
In the project, the Tapestri Platform was used to, “characterize the clonal architecture of multiple MM patient samples by single nucleotide variants (SNVs), copy number variants (CNVs), and surface immunophenotypes — marrying flow cytometry and bulk next-generation sequencing (NGS), but offering single-cell resolution.”
The data demonstrated how the Cancer Research Center of Toulouse and Genentech had utilized Tapestri to, “move beyond a binary ‘yes/no’ answer to the presence or absence of disease,” and “provide researchers and clinicians with critical information about MM disease progression and offer actionable personalized therapeutic target information that could enhance patient outcomes.”
Simply put, Tapestri goes beyond basic disease detection and offers detailed insights into MM’s progression and potential personalized treatment paths.
This application of the Tapestri tool builds on the company’s launch of its scMRD AML Multiomics Assay, with which clinician researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Erasmus MC used Tapestri to identify relapse and recurrence in AML.
The bottom line
In describing the Tapestri tool, Mission Bio offers a compelling summary of the implications of the MM data in the treatment of the disease, stating, “Tapestri provides a level of precision that opens the door for more tailored and effective treatment strategies.”
In order to effectively treat deadly diseases like MM, precision medicine and a science-based approach is essential.
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