NantHealth and ImmunityBio Announce RNA Profiling for Clinical Decision Support Publication In Nature’s Scientific Reports

NantHealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: NH), a provider of enterprise solutions that help businesses transform complex data into actionable insights, today announced the publication of a study that revealed RNA sequencing is not only viable but may also provide significant clinical value in analyzing a cancer patient’s specific disease biology to enable an optimized treatment decision with a higher likelihood of success. The study was published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, an open access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to original research from across all areas of the natural and clinical sciences.

Prepared in collaboration with NantOmics, LLC and ImmunityBio, Inc., the study was designed to explore the potential use of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE)-derived RNA transcriptome profiling for clinical decision-making. This technique was previously not considered to yield significant clinical value due to the lower quality, degraded samples typically produced by the formalin fixation process. FFPE is the most common method used in clinical settings for storing tumor biopsies.

The study revealed an overall sequencing success rate of 81% with highly consistent coverage in direct FFPE and fresh-frozen (FF) replicates (98% agreement). The results provide strong rationale for the use of FFPE-derived RNA sequencing in clinical decision-making based on the reproducibility, robustness, and consistency of whole transcriptome profiling. This research enables the comparison of clinical samples to research studies, which generally differ in both data collection and sequencing methods, and which may unlock highly valuable insights that would not be possible with DNA sequencing techniques alone.

“This is an important step to advancing towards molecularly informed medicine, both from the perspective of diagnostics to precise therapeutic intervention,” said Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, CEO of NantHealth, NantOmics and ImmunityBio. “Genomic reporting capabilities could be enhanced through clinical applications resulting from this technology, including identifying cancers of unknown primary (CUP), prevalence of immune cell infiltrates in the tumor microenvironment (immunome), and expression analysis of checkpoint markers including those targeted by commercial and investigational immunotherapies,” he continued.