Every year, the Mission Bio team looks forward to attending the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting, as it brings together pioneers from all around the world focusing on classical and malignant hematology. This year, the meeting was held at San Diego from December 9-12 with an impressive convergence of over 30,000 clinicians and scientists, one of the largest turnouts we’ve seen post COVID. It was quite the weekend, packed with oral and poster sessions from researchers and doctors unwavering in their commitment to advance clinical research, find new and effective therapies, and improve patient outcomes in a broad range of blood cancers.
This year’s ASH annual meeting also featured an impressive number of presentations from pharma and academic leaders, utilizing Tapestri for a great number of indications and applications in hematology. “We’re excited to see so many of our customers leverage Tapestri, validating the scientific merit of our technology,” said Todd Druley, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer of Mission Bio. “The data demonstrate the practical application of Tapestri in a clinical setting, and substantiates the impact of single-cell data to potentially transform care by guiding more personalized treatments in AML, multiple myeloma (MM), and other blood cancers.” If you happened to miss the oral and poster presentations featuring impactful Tapestri data at ASH this year, below are some highlights to bring you up to speed.
Novel therapeutic targets discovery
Dr. Monika Toma from Temple University School of Medicine delivered a great talk on taking advantage of DNA damage response (DDR) vulnerabilities in MPN to get rid of leukemic clones. Tapestri unraveled the clonal landscape of MPN at a single-cell resolution before and after the treatment with DDR inhibitors and clearly demonstrated the attrition of MPN clones upon treatment.
Dr. Joachim R. Goethert from University Hospital Essen used the platform to monitor patients with essential thrombocythemia (ET) treated with bomedemstat, a novel lysine-specific demethylase-1 (LSD1) inhibitor. Tapestri showed a reduction in stem/progenitor cells homozygous for mutations in JAK2, CALR, and MPL demonstrating the efficacy of this novel therapeutic.
Minimal residual disease (MRD) characterization in AML
Following the heels of the successful launch of the company’s scMRD assay in AML, Dr. Ana Alfonso Pierola from the lab of Dr. Felipe Prosper from Clínica Universidad de Navarra presented a poster demonstrating the feasibility of the scMRD AML Multiomics assay for assessing MRD in AML patients. In their study, they ran 24 cryopreserved bone marrow samples from 15 AML patients who achieved CR after induction and consolidation. Tapestri identified rare leukemic clones that were missed out by conventional assays, resolved the clonality of clinically actionable mutations and differentiated CH clones from leukemic clones. The outstanding data presented in the poster demonstrates scDNA sequencing technology as a feasible approach for clinical application and identification of the landscape of MRD Clones
“Patients suffering from relapsed AML have poor overall survival, necessitating more effective methods for MRD monitoring and detection to better understand the genomic landscape of clonal evolution. This impressive data is a significant step towards demonstrating the feasibility of Mission Bio’s assay to detect and monitor MRD in AML patients, to ultimately enable more effective therapeutic strategies, including combination and targeted therapies, based on insights from single-cell DNA and protein multiomics for improved patient outcomes in the future.”
– Felipe Prosper, MD, PhD, Co-director of the Hematology and Cell Therapy Unit at the Clínica Universidad de Navarra
Identifying mechanisms of drug resistance
Several posters were presented leveraging the Tapestri for identifying the molecular mechanisms underlying resistance to venetoclax, a targeted BCL-2 inhibitor in AML patients. Dr. Chong Chyn Chua from the lab of Dr. Andrew Wei from Alfred Hospital and Monash University delivered a presentation identifying the mechanisms of venetoclax treatment failure in NPM-1 mutated AML using Tapestri’s multi-omic approach. The data demonstrated that resistance was linked to the upregulation of alternative BCL-2 family pro-survival members or disruption of downstream pro-apoptotic BAX.
Understanding disease biology with multiomics
This year we saw a great number of posters that utilized Tapestri’s multi-modal approach to understand disease biology, delineate the molecular mechanisms of disease and unravel the heterogeneity underlying clinical diversity in several leukemias (AML,CML,B-ALL), lymphomas (DLBCL, FL) and multiple myeloma. Notably, Dr. Adam Sciambi, Chief Technology Officer from Mission Bio presented some exciting work in multiple myeloma in collaboration with Dr. Herve Avet-Loiseau from Institut universitaire du cancer de Toulouse Oncopole and Dr. Cedric Dos Santos from Genentech. The study combined simultaneous genotyping (SNV/Indels/CNV’s), immunophenotyping and VDJ clonotyping on the Tapestri platform to positively identify myeloma cells and pinpoint the presence of monoclonal antibody and antibody drug conjugate targets on these myeloma cells to deliver a comprehensive targeted multi-omics readout of the disease.
“Multiple Myeloma therapy, similarly to other blood cancers like AML, remains a challenge and huge unmet medical need because of the poor prognosis and high relapse rate. Tapestri’s ability to combine SNVs, CNVs, and surface protein expression at a single-cell level will be crucial to myeloma surveillance and understanding clonal evolution, and our ability to fully realize precision medicine.”
– Cedric Dos Santos, PhD, Director AML/MDS/MM, Translational Medicine, at Genentech.
For a complete list of ASH presentations using Tapestri, please visit here. All meeting attendees have access to the virtual meeting platform through the end of their registration period! So don’t forget to tune in and watch the on-demand sessions highlighting Tapestri single-cell multi-omics data!
