Elypta, a Swedish cancer detection company today announced the publication of a scientific study in the peer-reviewed journal JCO Precision Oncology using its GAGome-based liquid biopsy to predict and monitor responses of patients with Metastatic Renal Cell Carcinoma (mRCC) treated with tyrosine kinase inhibitors.
“These results suggest that GAGomes measured in the blood or urine could help clinicians understand if a patient with mRCC is responding or will respond to treatment”, says Francesco Gatto, Affiliated Researcher at the Karolinska Institute and lead author of the study, as well as Co-Founder & CSO at Elypta. “No liquid biomarkers are approved in metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC).However, the number of treatments available today for mRCC has drastically increased in the last two decades. Therefore, there is a substantial need to predict and monitor response non-invasively to tailor treatment choices. These results are encouraging and raise tantalizing questions about the fundamental biology of mRCC considering the changes we observed in GAGomes when mRCC responds or does not respond to treatment. For clinical practice, however, we need independent studies to validate the use of GAGomes for monitoring mRCC patients”.
The study was spearheaded by a collaboration between Prof. Jens Nielsen at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, and Dr. Ulrika Stierner and Dr. Sven Lundstam at Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg. The study included a prospective cohort of fifty patients with mRCC treated with first-line tyrosine kinase inhibitors as well as three retrospective cohorts contributed by Prof. Eric Jonasch at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas for validation. The study reported several changes in both the plasma and urine GAGome in correlation with response to treatment, which was assessed foreach patient every 6-8 weeks after treatment started. In the study, machine learning models developed using plasma and urine GAGome data were shown to be able to monitor response with comparable performance to other widely used non-invasive monitoring biomarkers, such as CA19-9 in pancreatic cancer.
Karl Bergman, CEO at Elypta, commented: “This study adds further insights when it comes to the potential of using GAGomes to guide critical medical decisions in cancer. We now look forward to the results of our ongoing study for renal cell carcinoma recurrence surveillance to further validate the diagnostic and monitoring performance of GAGomes in renal cell carcinoma”.
Publication in JCO Precision Oncology (JCO PO); https://ascopubs.org/doi/full/10.1200/PO.22.00361
Protocols:
First-line therapy: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02732665; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02732665
Retrospective cohorts: ClinicalTrials.gov identifiers: NCT00715442; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00715442 and NCT00126594; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00126594
About Elypta’s study on Kidney cancer recurrence
AURORAX-0087A(AUR87A) is a prospective multi-center observational in vitro diagnostics clinical validation cohort study to validate the diagnostic performance of free GAGome-based tests for the early detection of recurrence after curative intent surgery in patients with high or intermediate risk ccRCC. The study is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 849251 and more information can be found atclinicaltrials.gov (NCT04006405).
About Elypta
Elypta is a Swedish cancer detection company focused on reducing cancer mortality by enabling earlier detection and closer monitoring. The metabolism-based liquid biopsy platform measures a novel panel of glycosaminoglycan biomarkers (GAGome)and algorithms trained to detect of cancer-specific signatures. Elypta is advancing a broad study program across different cancers with the leading indications being early detection of recurrence in renal cell carcinoma and multi-cancer screening. www.elypta.com.
