January 15, 2024
OncoHost: Guiding oncology treatment decisions with one blood draw
Original source here.
What OncoHost does
OncoHost is a technology company headquartered in Binyamina, Israel, and Cary, North Carolina, transforming the approach to precision medicine for improved patient outcomes. OncoHost aims to understand the patient's unique response to cancer therapy to overcome one of the major obstacles in clinical oncology today – resistance to treatment.
The Current Landscape
There are several tissue or liquid biopsy products in the market that investigate tumor- related mutations. OncoHost’s proteomic pattern recognition and machine learning tools represent a unique, differentiated approach.
Currently, competitors offer either prognostic tools, which provide information about the patient’s overall cancer outcome; or, at best, predictive tools, which provide insights about the effect of a therapeutic intervention. Other earlier stage companies are exploring tumor- related RNA, spatial arrangement of cells in the tumor, or single cell analysis.
To date, there are no predictive/prognostic tests that can accurately predict response to immunotherapy and effectively guide clinical treatment decisions.
Company Birth Story
Studies conducted in the laboratory of Prof. Yuval Shaked of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, serve as the scientific basis for OncoHost’s technology. Prof Shaked’s team discovered that the body has a biological reaction to any administered anti-cancer treatment, including immunotherapy, chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and targeted drugs.
During this phenomenon, called the “host response,” many different biological compounds, including proteins that may interfere with the treatment’s proper function, are secreted into the bloodstream. To overcome this clinical issue, Prof. Shaked co-founded OncoHost to create the PROphet® platform.
The Solution
Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide and while immunotherapy has emerged as a significant treatment breakthrough, its effectiveness falls far below its potential. For years, researchers have tried to understand why immunotherapy is effective in some cases, but not in others, with only 20-40% of late-stage patients actually responding. The NCI has named “resistance to therapy” as one of the major challenges in clinical oncology to date.
Insightful biomarkers hold the key to better optimizing immunotherapy, determining which patients will benefit from these treatments before they are administered. This is vitally important for the patient’s outcome, and financially crucial to avoid wasting precious healthcare resources.
Current biomarkers for immunotherapy are limited and inadequate. To overcome this industry issue, OncoHost developed the PROphet® platform, a disruptive plasma-based proteomic pattern recognition tool that combines system biology, bioinformatics, and machine learning to support clinical decision-making.
PROphet® uses an advanced AI/ML algorithm to identify and analyze key biomarkers in one blood sample. Optimizing the identification of these accurate biomarkers enables physicians to know the best way to treat each patient, resulting in improved survival outcomes.
Requiring just one pre-treatment blood test for analysis, PROphet® scans approximately 7,000 proteins in a patient's blood and delivers a report that shows whether the patient will benefit from immunotherapy alone vs. immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy, addressing one of the most common daily dilemmas of the oncologist with an accuracy and level of resolution that simply does not exist today. OncoHost is not only identifying the protein patterns that impact specific therapeutics with a single blood draw, but is also determining what is causing the associated treatment resistance. This allows the company to guide patients and physicians to treatment options that are associated with the patient’s specific resistance profile.
This level of understanding of the patient’s proteomic profile is spurring OncoHost’s research into predicting immune-related adverse events prior to a patient receiving the therapy. Now, not only will physicians know the appropriate treatment plan for each patient based on predicted overall survival, but they will also be able to factor in potential side effects when making treatment plan decisions.
The indication-agnostic nature of PROphet® allows for easy replicability across multiple indications and quick scale-up. The platform’s first indication is non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), with multiple in the pipeline including melanoma, small cell lung cancer, renal cell carcinoma, head and neck cancer, urogenital cancer, and more. The company is also expanding the PROphet® platform to cover more treatment modalities and at earlier disease stages i.e., targeted therapies, chemotherapy, radiation, and combinations of these modalities.
OncoHost runs an ongoing, prospective, multicenter clinical trial to characterize a patient’s response profile, demonstrate the capabilities of the PROphet® test, and identify new targets for therapy in advanced malignancies. Currently, the study has over 40 open sites across the US, US, EU, and Israel, and over 1,700 recruited patients, making it one of the largest prospective cohorts in the precision oncology field.
With its solid scientific infrastructure and strong IP position, OncoHost seeks to provide clinicians with actionable clinical insights into optimal treatment choices and a better understanding of their patients’ personalized cancer resistance dynamics.
A Customer Story
Customer Testimonials:
“To date, we do not have a very effective way of predicting response to therapy for these patients. PROphet®️ is an answer to that dilemma. It️ helps me understand just how much therapy I need in my patients with advanced NSCLC and gives me reassurance in my decision-making.” Dr. Jason Porter
“PROphet®️ helps guide my treatment decisions by predicting patient response and better understanding how the treatment will work. The test is easy to obtain, and reliable.” Dr. Venkat Pavan Kancharla
“I had a few patients who had high PD-L1, with no response to single-agent Pembro treatment and with rapidly progressive disease. PROphet®️ has been very helpful in this setting.” Dr. Geeta Kurra
“PROphet®️ in my opinion is not only predictive, but also prognostic. What stands out about the test is its strong validation process and being quick and easy to obtain.” Dr. Edgardo Santos
“PROphet®️ is a new technology that allows us to see who will have significant benefit from immunotherapy alone, therefore potentially avoiding the need for chemo and over-treating patients.” Dr. Sam Huang
Check it out : https://www.oncohost.com/
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https://www.facebook.com/OncoHost/
