Leading Cancer Institutes Leverage Mission Bio’s Tapestri Platform to Reveal New Patterns of Evolution Underlying Leukemia Therapy Resistance

Mission Bio, Inc., the pioneer in high-throughput single-cell multiomics and DNA analysis, today announced the publication of a study demonstrating the power of its Tapestri® Platform to help characterize relapse-driving cells in patients with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). The study of 81 patients, led by researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, highlights co-occurring therapy-driven mutations that stand to impact future treatment strategies and combinatorial approaches. The findings were published in Blood, the peer-reviewed medical journal of The American Society of Hematology.

While the FDA approved venetoclax-based combination therapies for older or unfit patients with AML in November 2018, therapy resistance and disease relapse remain challenges. Bulk sequencing provides a view of the genomic factors that influence treatment outcomes, but lacks the resolution necessary to characterize the complex, polyclonal mechanisms of treatment resistance. 

With Mission Bio’s Tapestri Platform, senior investigators from MD Anderson Cancer Center and Monash University sought to gain insight into clinically relevant genomic factors influencing treatment outcome among patients receiving these venetoclax-based combination therapies. Through the unique sensitivity of the Tapestri Platform, the team discovered multiple resistant leukemic clones,  with several co-occurring  mutations in the same cells. These resistant clones acted as a barrier to the long-term success of combination therapies. These insights also highlight the value of single-cell approaches for early assessment of therapy response to better guide treatment and the potential application of dynamic therapies. 

“Great strides have been made in targeted therapy development, but the polyclonality of AML means that therapy resistance remains a prominent hurdle, as cell populations or clones evolve and acquire mutations that evade targeted therapy,” explained Charlie Silver, CEO of Mission Bio.  “For the most precise and impactful treatment program, a deep understanding of each tumor’s true heterogeneity and precise resistance mechanisms is paramount.”

With single-cell resolution, researchers are better equipped to describe the polyclonality that underlies clinical resistance to targeted agents and, in turn, take steps to better suppress it. As a result of this previously undocumented insight, the teams predict that new drugs and combinations, risk stratification, precision-based monitoring, and molecularly guided risk-adaptive therapy will be the new normal for older patients, who previously had few effective treatment options. 

About Mission Bio

Mission Bio delivers targeted solutions for high impact applications with the Tapestri Platform. The Tapestri Platform is the industry’s first and only single-cell multi-omics platform, enabling genotype and phenotype from the same cell, and precise detection of heterogeneity in disease progression and treatment response. Application areas include blood cancers, solid tumors, and genome editing validation. The company’s Tapestri Platform was also honored as a Top 10 Innovation of 2018 by The Scientist, as well as utilized by researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) for the largest single-cell study completed to date. With Mission Bio, researchers have a highly sensitive, targeted, and customizable solution to move precision medicine forward.

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