Lunit today announced that it will present three abstracts at the upcoming 37th Annual Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Meeting, being held virtually November 8-12 in Boston, MA.
As a leading provider of cutting-edge cancer diagnostic technology, Lunit has focused on the development of novel AI biomarkers for use in immunotherapy. Since 2019, the company has published groundbreaking results based on its AI-assisted tissue analysis platform Lunit SCOPE, demonstrating the predictive value of the software in identifying patients eligible for immunotherapy.
This year, Lunit presentations at SITC 2022 will highlight the effectiveness of Lunit SCOPE IO in accelerating immunotherapy clinical trials and drug development.
Lunit SCOPE IO analyzes a patient’s cancer tissue image by observing the distribution of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) – one of the representative immunocytes that fight cancer cells. Based on the spatial distribution of TILs and cancer cells in the tumor microenvironment, Lunit SCOPE IO identifies the tissue sample as one of three immune phenotypes: inflamed, immune excluded, or immune desert.
One of the studies presented aimed to analyze the multi-cancer landscape of HER2-low expression using clinical data, pathological cuts and genetic expression registered in the National Cancer Institute’s The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).
To understand the immune microenvironment of HER2-expressing tumors, Lunit researchers performed spatial analysis of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) associated with HER2 status. As part of this study, Lunit SCOPE IO was applied to analyze pathological slides from 7,322 patients with 22 cancer types derived from the TCGA dataset.
“The recently approved next-generation HER2 antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) has opened the door to more effective treatments for HER2-low breast cancer, for which previously there were limited treatment options. It has become important to gain more insight into the immune response tumor microenvironment for future combinatorial strategies with immune checkpoint inhibitors,” said Chan-Young Ock, Lunit’s Chief Medical Officer.
“Lunit SCOPE IO, an artificial intelligence-based H&E analyzer, can provide immune phenotypes by performing spatial analysis of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). This study demonstrates the ability of Lunit SCOPE IO to further identify potential responders to the combination therapy,” he added.
Lunit will also present results from a meta-analysis study comparing discontinuation rates of immunotherapy alone (IO-only) versus immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy (chemo-IO) due to treatment-emergent adverse events (TRAE). 41 clinical studies with over 13,000 patient cases were examined. Compared to pure IO, the results showed that Chemo-IO has a significantly higher TRAE-related dropout rate.
Discontinuation due to TRAE can lead to suboptimal treatment outcomes, warranting the discovery of a novel biomarker that can accurately predict which patients will achieve a sustained response to pure IO without early discontinuation of treatment. Therefore, this study can be an important reference to prove the clinical validity of Lunit SCOPE IO to eliminate the unnecessary potential risks that may arise from chemo-IO.
Another study co-authored by Lunit aims to evaluate the clinical efficacy of NeoImmuneTech’s NT-I7 (efineptakin alfa) and pembrolizumab in supporting T-cell infiltration in patients with microsatellite stable colorectal cancer (MSS colorectal) and pancreatic cancer without standard treatment option.
In this clinical study, biopsies were analyzed before and during treatment with Lunit SCOPE IO to objectively measure the increase in TIL infiltration. While objectively measuring TIL in small biopsied samples can be challenging, Lunit SCOPE IO is able to sensitively detect TIL in these difficult-to-analyze tissues – indicating a practical application for the AI model in a clinical study area.
“We are excited to return to SITC this year to present new findings that validate the effectiveness of Lunit’s AI biomarker platform as a practical research tool for clinical trials,” said Brandon Suh, CEO of Lunit.
