This week, we’re talking to some of the companies that attended the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting in Chicago.

We have interviews with Microbiotica, OneCell Diagnostics, and Tessellate Bio.

Interview times:

01:55 Tessellate Bio

17:02 OneCell Diagnostics

44:04 Microbiotica

Microbiotica

Mat Robinson, SVP Research at Microbiotica, is one of our guests.

Microbiotica presented new data at AACR about the microbiome and the mechanism of action of MB097, a clinical-stage drug candidate being evaluated in combination with KEYTRUDA (pembrolizumab) in patients with advanced melanoma.

MB097 comprises nine different species of gut commensal bacteria, all linked to positive CPI response in multiple clinical studies. Microbiotica has developed in vitro human systems using primary immune cells to investigate how gut bacteria modulate the immune response to cancer.

Three of the MB097 strains induce dendritic cells to produce high levels of IL-12, which in turn stimulates Cytotoxic T Lymphocytes and NK cells with potent tumour cell killing activity.

OneCell Diagnostics

OneCell Diagnostics, an AI-powered precision oncology company, announced a new product for the US biotech and pharma market and a new partnership before the AACR meeting,

OneCell launched OncoIncytes, a multi-modal cancer diagnostic panel that integrates multiple types of data, including circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA), circulating tumour cells (CTC) at single cell resolution, RNA transcriptomics, and proteomics (150 proteins at the single cell level).

The company said the technology is transforming cancer research, drug development, patient selection, and therapy response monitoring with unprecedented granularity.

OneCell is also joining forces with BioSkryb Genomics, a pioneer in single cell multi-omics, to co-develop and commercialize next-generation single cell multi-omic solutions.

Researchers can now isolate CTCs at one in a billion, and characterize DNA, RNA, and protein targets from these individual single cells with unprecedented precision, significantly accelerating the development of advanced therapies, including antibody-drug conjugates.

On the podcast, we had a conversation with Mohan Uttarwar, CEO and co-founder of OneCell Diagnostics.

Tessellate Bio

Boehringer Ingelheim and Tessellate Bio have partnered to develop first-in-class precision treatments for people with hard-to-treat cancers. The partners will focus on developing first-in-class, oral precision treatments for people living with cancer.

The collaboration aims to develop treatments targeting tumours dependent on alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT) for their growth. This feature is present in 10-15% of all cancers and is associated with poor prognosis and a lack of targeted therapies.

Tessellate Bio has developed inhibitors of an undisclosed target that plays a key role in enabling the uncontrolled growth of ALT positive cancer cells. Blocking this target has been shown to lead to increased DNA damage, replication stress and ultimately tumour cell death, specifically in ALT positive tumour cells. A benefit is that healthy cells are not affected because they have no dependency on this mechanism.

Andree Blaukat, CEO of Tessellate Bio, tells us more.

To get in touch with guest suggestions, please email jim@deeptechdigest.com