West Coast Immuno-Oncology Xchange
San Francisco
28 September 2022
Welcome to hubXchange’s West Coast Immuno-Oncology Xchange 2022, bringing together executives from pharma and biotech to address and find solutions to the key issues faced in developing immuno-oncology therapies, through a series of highly-interactive roundtable discussions.
Discussion topics will cover Immune Biomarkers, Translational Research, Clinical Development, Combination Strategies and Next-Generation Therapies.
Take advantage of this unique and productive meeting format designed for maximum engagement, collaboration and networking with your peers.
NOTE: This will be an In-Person event
VENUE DETAILS: DoubleTree by Hilton San Francisco Airport Hotel, 835 Airport Blvd., Burlingame CA 94010-9949
Immune Biomarkers
Opening Address & Keynote Presentation
Immune Perspectives – Standing Back and Looking Forward
The immune system is possibly the most pleiotropic system constituting human biology. This coupled with the ever-increasing technological advancements in the field of immunology has generated a proverbial flood of knowledge relating to the immune systems involvement in almost of every aspect of human health and disease. Biopharmaceutical companies have harnessed the adaptability and power of the immune system to create multiple novel therapies that merely a decade ago would have been almost science fiction.This presentation provides a perspective on the development of the field of immunology and also looks forward to opportunities that will generate further innovation.
Chief Medical Officer, Synexa
Justin is a medical doctor, immunologist and pharmacologist and a co-founder and CMO of Synexa.
His primary focus is to understand our clients’ objectives in new drug development and to
implement biomarker strategies that bring real insight to the challenges of clinical development and
the immunological underpinning of health and disease.
Challenges of using multiplex technologies and spatial phenotyping to dissect tumor microenvironment in translation and clinical research
- Limitations of predictive biomarkers in immuno-oncology
- Improving biomarker discovery with multiplex immunofluorescence
- Application of spatial biomarkers in translational and clinical research
Director, Clinical Biomarkers
Compugen
Yu Liang is currently Director of Clinical Biomarkers at Compugen heading implementation of biomarkers in clinical trials to develop drugs targeting immune checkpoints. He brings in 20 years of expertise and leadership in precision medicine, including assay development in research and IVD, and application of genomic and genetic profiling for patient stratification. Before Compugen, he was Director of Translational Sciences in Oncology at Ipsen, leading translation of pre-clinical biomarkers into early phase clinical trials. Prior to Ipsen, he led development of clinical biomarker for drugs targeting amino acid metabolism at Calithera and managed the clinical biomarker portfolios of Ibrutinib for non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas at Pharmacyclics.
Advanced Phenotyping of the Tumor Immune Microenvironment
- The development and validation process of an automated high throughput, high-plex multiplexed assay to derive meaningful biological insights
- Comparison of multiplexed staining to standard IHC DAB staining
- Considerations for reproducibility-single marker staining vs multiplexed staining
Senior Manager, FAS, Global, Ultivue
Dr. Bonnie Phillips is the Senior Manager of the Global Field Applications Team at Ultivue in Cambridge, MA, where she leads the efforts of the FAS team to educate and train customers on Ultivue’s InSituPlex technology and their image analysis needs. She first joined Ultivue in June of 2018 as a Field Application Scientist. Before working at Ultivue, she was a postdoctoral Fellow at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she gained a large amount of experience with the troubleshooting and optimization of fluorescent immunohistochemistry assays and imaging. She has a PhD in Biomedical Sciences with a focus on immunology and infectious disease from Tulane University in New Orleans, LA.
Networking Lunch
The modern immuno-oncology drug program has a great need for multi-faceted, complex biomarkers. However, the default choice for diagnostic assay development remains low-plex, manual pathology reads. These assays can produce high variability across interpreters, and lack the full contextual data to truly understand the drug’s effect on biology. The high cost of getting a drug to market includes the intense competition over finding the correct patients, making fast and accurate decisions critical to success. Data-centric, cell-based pathology analyses provide context beyond traditional scoring for any biomarker, along with a significant decrease in variability. The current paradigm of manual, single-marker reads may compromise patient selection and reduce the chance of finding responders.
Spatial biology solutions are now emerging for several demands across the immuno-oncology space. In particular, there is an urgent need to precisely characterize and understand the tumor microenvironment (TME). However, the biomarker requirements for a drug can also be tailored to its program. A CLIA-certified tissue imaging partner can generate spatial insights from monoplex, multiplex or CISH assays – allowing for specific customization to the study and the correct patients to be identified.
Chief Medical Officer, Flagship Biosciences
Dr. Roberto Gianani, Chief Medical Officer at Flagship Biosciences, Inc., is a practicing pathologist board certified in anatomic, clinical, and pediatric pathology. He completed a fellowship in surgical pathology and transfusion medicine. His research interests include immuno-oncology and image analysis as it pertains to pathology. Roberto’s professional experience includes several years as an academic pathologist at the University of Colorado and has held numerous positions as Laboratory Director. Roberto has published extensively in the field on immunology, pathology, and autoimmunity. His work at Flagship reflects his interest, contributing to the company’s continued efforts to help detect cancer at the cellular level.
Immune landscape and gene signatures in immuno-therapy
- Association observed between T (immune) cell infiltration treatment outcome in cancer patients treated with CPI or cellular immunotherapy
- Gene expression signatures might be useful to assess immune and or stromal infiltration in the TME, however there is no validated assay available for patient stratification/selection
- Does size matter? Which is better to assess the immune landscape? Large gene signatures which could contain numerous members of a given pathway or small, more focused gene sets which contain only a few marker genes?
- Tissue pre-analytics is key to gain high quality gene expression information, therefore only FFPE tissues which reviewed by a pathologist should be used to analyze the tumor immune landcape
Senior Director, Fate Therapeutics
Peter M Szabo MD, PhD is a Senior Director of Clinical Translation at Fate Therapeutics a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of human induced pluripotent stem cells derived cellular immunotherapies for patients with cancer.
Dr. Szabo received his medical degree and PhD from the Semmelweis University and his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary. His education was followed by a fellowship at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in biomarker statistics and bioinformatics. Most recently, dr. Szabo served as Associate Director of Translational Medicine and Bioinformatics and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
3:30-4:00pm
4:00-4:10pm
Afternoon Refreshments
- Introduction to InSituPlex® DNA-barcoding and antibody staining technology for multiplex fluorescence applications
- How to make use of multi-parameter data within theTME – spatial mapping,dynamic range of expression, and co-localization of markers on individual cells
- Application focused case studies
Senior Manager, FAS, Global, Ultivue
Dr. Bonnie Phillips is the Senior Manager of the Global Field Applications Team at Ultivue in Cambridge, MA, where she leads the efforts of the FAS team to educate and train customers on Ultivue’s InSituPlex technology and their image analysis needs. She first joined Ultivue in June of 2018 as a Field Application Scientist. Before working at Ultivue, she was a postdoctoral Fellow at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she gained a large amount of experience with the troubleshooting and optimization of fluorescent immunohistochemistry assays and imaging. She has a PhD in Biomedical Sciences with a focus on immunology and infectious disease from Tulane University in New Orleans, LA.
Predictive biomarkers for cancer immunotherapy
- How can we best utilize preclinical models for IO biomarker discovery and patient selection?
- Are virally driven tumors unique for IO therapy?
- Platforms and strategies to understand and predict tumor responses in complex immune environment.
Principal Investigator, Discovery Biology, RAPT Theraputics
George Katibah Ph.D. is a Principal investigator in the discovery biology group at RAPT Therapeutics developing small molecule drugs to for immune-oncology and inflammatory conditions including atopic dermatitis. Prior to RAPT therapeutics George held positions of increasing responsibility at Aduro Biotech working on several programs across multiple therapeutic modalities including the first in human small molecule STING agonists and personalized cancer vaccine programs. George received his Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from UC Berkeley.
