Custom Immune Monitoring Assay Development

Because the purpose of clinical development is to bring new therapies to market, studies often need to find answers for previously unasked questions, questions that don’t fit neatly into one specific method or approach. These are the projects Precision thrives on, devising clever and practical solutions for new challenges.

One example is illustrated in the diagram below where we addressed a client’s need to generate multiple types of biomarker analyses from a single skin punch biopsy. We were able to demonstrate that we could store the biopsy in RNAlater, section the tissue into thirds, and ship to multiple facilities and still obtain accurate and reliable biomarker data.

In the above example, each skin-punch sample was analysed using immunofluorescence and H&E staining, RNA-seq to understand gene expression (NanoString was also an option), and Epiontis ID^® for immune cell profiling. Through this custom assay we were able to determine the spatial

distribution and numbers of specific immune cells, and integrate this information with their mRNA signatures, efficiently uncovering complex molecular insights into patient biology that would have been otherwise difficult to obtain.