Life sciences company Lunaphore (Lausanne, Switzerland) will collaborate with the Pathology Department at Massachusetts General Hospital to create an in vitro diagnostic (IVD) to evaluate the sensitivity of solid tumors to poly-ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitors.
Lunaphore’s chip technology can extract spatial proteomic and genomic data from tumors.
The project will first focus on ovarian, breast and prostate cancers.
PARP inhibitors work by preventing cancer cells from repairing damaged DNA.
COMET 6-plex on breast cancer. Image courtesy of Lunaphore.
“The DNA repair pathway called homologous recombination is of clinical interest as tumors with homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) have been found to be sensitive to PARP inhibitors,” said Diego G. Dupouy, chief technology officer of Lunaphore, in a statement. “However, current methods of identifying HRD in tumors have been varied and imperfect.”
Dr. Markus D. Herrmann, director of computational pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital, will lead the project. Hermann will work with colleagues and Lunaphore to develop a multiplexed immunofluorescence assay to measure the expression of proteins using the COMET platform now in use at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The development of a quantitative image-based proteomic assay can potentially gauge DNA repair at the single-cell level in spatial tissue to monitor response to PARP inhibitor therapy.