On November 10, 2020 InterVenn Biosciences reported that its proprietary liquid biopsy glycoproteomic research panel, Vista, has demonstrated multi-indication performance in early cancer detection based on tests run in the company’s Bay Area laboratory (Press release, InterVenn Biosciences, NOV 10, 2020, View Source [SID1234570557]). InterVenn, in collaboration with several large pharma-biotech and diagnostic users of Vista, has been able to repeatedly and reliably generate multivariable glycopeptide classifiers for a range of different forms of cancer with sensitivities and specificities consistently above 90 and as high as 98 percent.
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InterVenn and its research partners have used Vista to demonstrate the power of glycoproteomic profiles as biomarkers for over a dozen different oncology indications, including ovarian, renal, lung, liver, prostate, pancreas, nasopharyngeal, and colorectal cancer, as well as to predict the response to checkpoint-inhibitor treatment. Vista’s application-specific disease classifier panels each consist of a limited number of glycopeptide signatures provide highly targeted readouts with accuracy rates that the "one-size-fits-all approaches" pursued by others have so far generally failed to achieve.
"The push towards personalized medicine and matching patients to the most effective and safest therapy options based on their individual biology– particularly in cancer — has been limited because of our inability to fully understand all the complexities of the patient and the disease," said Aldo Carrascoso, Chief Executive Officer of InterVenn. "The sophisticated, differentiated approach we are taking acknowledges, and masters, the complexity of cancer, and takes the inherent heterogeneity among different malignancies appropriately into account enabling patients and their physicians to jointly make better treatment decisions."
While finding a "pan-cancer" diagnostic test has long been considered the holy grail of cancer screening, the results that have been made available to date have been mixed, generally falling short of the high sensitivity and specificity requirements needed for such screening tests to be clinically useful. Rather than utilizing sequencing technologies, InterVenn has focused its exploratory work on characterizing glycoprotein profiles, arguing that the considerably higher complexity and dynamic range of proteins and their post-translational modifications provide the deep repertoire of analytes that is likely required to yield the resolution needed for highly accurate biomarker panels. Scientists at InterVenn are focused on the glycoproteomic diversity inherent in specific malignancies, as opposed to seeking a "common denominator" that could serve as a generic cancer test.
"The elegance and power of InterVenn’s approach with Vista is that it can be deployed in a highly targeted fashion in individuals at high risk for a particular disease – such as women with BRCA mutations who have a 25-fold risk of ovarian cancer – but that it can also be used to assess the risk for a broad range of malignancies, by determining individual disease-specific risk classifiers of interest from within the entire Vista family. The repertoire of indications accessible through our platform already matches or exceeds that pursued by DNA-based platforms, and is being expanded aggressively," said Klaus Lindpaintner, MD, MPH, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer of InterVenn Biosciences.
InterVenn also recently announced that it has identified marked differences in the glycoproteomic profile of patients who became seriously ill with COVID-19 as compared to individuals who had also been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus but experienced no or minimal symptoms. These differences may shed important new light on the natural history of the disease and may relate to interindividual differences in susceptibility. The AI-enabled glycoproteomic analysis of nearly 100 blood samples was conducted in Intervenn’s South San Francisco lab, with additional studies in complementary COVID-19 patients and other reference cohorts still currently ongoing.
"We are very encouraged by the enthusiasm and eagerness we are encountering from scientists in academia as well as industry for this previously inaccessible layer of biology that our technology has opened up to be interrogated. The types of indications and applications our users present to us are a clear validation of the important role glycoproteomics plays in diagnostics as well as drug development. This supports our mission of applying our technology to improve the lives of patients," said Erwin Estigarribia, Chief Operating Officer of InterVenn.