Webinar

In this talk, Dr. Alexander “Sandy” Borowsky will share preliminary results of an ongoing biomarker discovery study on breast cancer cohorts, including those participating in the I-SPY 2 trial, and how the in situ analysis of the tumor microenvironment is critical to understanding immunotherapy response. The I-SPY 2 trial: Neoadjuvant and Personalized Adaptive Novel Agents to Treat Breast Cancer was launched by UCSF in collaboration with a private-public partnership to improve efficiency of breast cancer clinical trials and streamline the development of new drugs. Breast cancers, overall, infrequently respond to immunotherapy. And immunotherapies, which harness the immune system to fight cancer, are being used in the early high-risk treatment setting. However, individual tumors show dramatic variation in patterns of the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) with both immune “cold” and inflamed phenotypes. We hypothesized that the TIME pattern might predict responses to immunotherapy and/or prognosis/outcomes. We examined the TIME of high-risk invasive breast cancer and high-risk non-invasive ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), hypothesizing that immune evasion might be one of the critical steps in progression of DCIS to invasive carcinoma. Leveraging current clinical trials, we have performed gene expression analyses (bulk) and multiplexed-immunohistochemistry (mIHC). We have optimized two 7-color assay panels using the Opal detection and artificial intelligence-assisted image analysis to provide specific cell segmented assignment of location and applied proximity analyses for cell-cell interaction assessment. These data show distinct differences in the TIME and reveal predictions of early response.

An innovative platform, called AstroPath, has been developed to analyze large multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) datasets using celestial object–mapping algorithms to rapidly identify optimized predictive phenotypic signatures. In this webinar, Dr. Janis Taube and Dr. Alexander S. Szalay from Johns Hopkins describe how the AstroPath technology was conceived and developed, share successes applying AstroPath to answering questions about tumor microenvironment-immune system interactions, and provide preliminary results of comparisons across different institutions to assess mIF assay performance.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a new pandemic disease caused by infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). A multi-institutional exploratory research taskforce, named EXPLORE COVID-19, conducted a longitudinal analysis of immune responses of patients at various stages of COVID-19 severity. The goal of the study, which also included a team from Innate Pharma, was to gain translational insights to better understand the immune response in COVID-19 patients and identify potential targets to fight the viral infection. During this webinar, Dr. Remark will provide an overview of the study methodology. Thereafter, he will focus on the C5a-C5aR1 axis and explain its role in the pathophysiology of acute respiratory distress syndrome. This was done by using several techniques, including multiplexed immunohistochemistry. Together, the data support C5a-C5aR1 axis blockade as a means of limiting myeloid cell infiltration in damaged organs and preventing the excessive lung inflammation and endothelialitis in COVID-19 patients. The results from this study were applied to an ongoing COVID-19 clinical trial.

Marquee webinar featuring the recent neuroscience work, published in Cell, by Dr. Ke-qi Fan, Research Lead, Jin Jin Molecular Immunology Lab, Life Sciences Institute of Zhejiang University