Personalis Presents Data from New Platform Features at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) 37th Annual Meeting

Personalis, Inc. (Nasdaq: PSNL) today announced that the company will share data resulting from expanded features of its NeXT Platform at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Annual Meeting, November 8-12 in Boston, with three abstracts that highlight advanced R&D applications of next-generation sequencing (NGS) in immuno-oncology.

"To understand the complex dynamics of cancer and ultimately better predict response to therapy, we need to advance the tools we're using to characterize the tumor microenvironment. We continue to build upon the suite of technologies in our ImmunoID NeXT Platform to enable the high-resolution study of immuno-oncology targets in an array of contexts, including improved neoantigen prediction, immune-composition profiling, and composite biomarker signatures,” said Sean Boyle, PhD, Executive Director of Bioinformatics Science at Personalis.

The company will present the following posters at SITC2022, as well as with customers including the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (Abstracts 559 and 587) and Geneos Therapeutics (Abstracts 691 and 692).

Title: A combination of antigen presentation and T-cell recognition features improves neoantigen immunogenicity predictions (Abstract 51)

Overview: Tumor neoantigen burden outperformed tumor mutational burden in prediction of patient response to checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy by better capturing the biological mechanism underlying response. However, immune recognition of neoantigens by T-cells requires more than antigen presentation, which has been the focus of tumor neoantigen burden thus far. To address this need, we extend the existing SHERPA MHC-presentation framework to predict neoantigen immunogenicity. By combining antigen presentation and T-cell recognition features in a two-tiered model, we can better predict immunogenic neoantigens and make progress towards using neoantigens as biomarkers to assess checkpoint inhibitor efficacy.

Title: Sensitive prediction of immunotherapy response by integrating immune infiltration and neoantigen presentation score in late-stage melanoma (Abstract 119)

Overview: Single-modality biomarkers such as tumor mutational burden (TMB) often fail to reliably predict response to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB), likely due to incomplete characterization of the complex tumor-immune interactions that influence treatment efficacy. We previously developed the composite biomarker, neoantigen presentation score (NEOPS), which integrates neoantigen processing and presentation potency, and showed it outperformed TMB and other single-modality biomarkers in predicting ICB response in melanoma. Here, we combined NEOPS with the assessment of tumor immune infiltration and demonstrated more accurate patient stratification for ICB response.