Akoya Biosciences and NeraCare Enter into an Exclusive Agreement to Enable Personalized Therapy Selection for Early-Stage Melanoma Patients

Leveraging Akoya’s market-leading PhenoImager HT platform and clinical development expertise with NeraCare’s Immunoprint test and best-in-class clinical data, the partnership will focus on increasing access to life saving therapies for early-stage melanoma patients.

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. and FRANKFURT, Germany, May 09, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Akoya Biosciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: AKYA), The Spatial Biology Company, and NeraCare, a leading developer of laboratory tests for the prognosis of melanoma patients, announced an exclusive agreement today under which the parties will develop market opportunities for combining Akoya’s PhenoImager HT platform and NeraCare’s Immunoprint assay for patient stratification and therapy selection in early-stage melanoma patients.

Melanoma is the leading cause of skin cancer-related deaths, with over 235,000 new diagnoses globally every year. Recent approvals of immune- and targeted therapies have greatly expanded the available treatment options for adjuvant therapy. Nonetheless, a significant number of early-stage melanoma patients remain at high risk of relapse and mortality without access to such therapies. As the majority of melanoma patients are diagnosed with early stage disease, there is a critical unmet medical need to identify those at-risk patients to potentially enable earlier access to life-saving therapeutic agents.

“NeraCare’s Immunoprint assay has demonstrated robust clinical performance in identifying early-stage melanoma patients at high risk of relapse through multiple, independent, prospective and retrospective clinical studies. The Immunoprint high-risk patient group has a risk of relapse comparable to those patients in later stages with approved adjuvant therapies. Therefore, the Immunoprint high-risk patient group is ideally suited to potentially benefit from these therapeutic options that would usually only be administered in later stages. We believe Immunoprint is in a class of its own in terms of the potential to positively impact patients’ lives,” said Daniel von Janowski, Co-Founder of NeraCare.

At this year's ASCO Annual Meeting, updated clinical data from the MELARISK-001 study in stage IB/IIA will be presented.

"We are pleased to partner with Akoya Biosciences, a leader in spatial biology. The PhenoImager HT platform, with its powerful multiplex immunofluorescence capabilities, is an excellent match for our Immunoprint assay. This combination enables precise and efficient spatial phenotyping while using a minimal number of tissue sections,” said Friedrich Ackermann, Co-Founder of NeraCare.