NEW YORK – Massachusetts General Hospital's pathology department and Swiss diagnostics firm Lunaphore Technologies on Thursday announced a collaboration to develop an in vitro test to evaluate tumor sensitivity to PARP inhibitors.
The project will be led by Markus Herrmann, director of computational pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and will initially focus on developing a test for ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers. The research will explore methods to identify tumors with homologous recombination deficiency, which are often more sensitive to PARP inhibitors. The assay could aid treatment selection for targeted therapies and potentially improve outcomes for patients treated with these drugs, Diego Dupouy, Lunaphore's chief technology officer, said in a statement.
The partners hope to develop a multiplexed immunofluorescence assay using Lunaphore's Comet platform. Comet, which is already installed at Massachusetts General, is a spatial biology tool that combines staining and imaging in one platform.
"We look forward to developing a quantitative image-based proteomic assay to comprehensively assess DNA repair at the single-cell level in spatial tissue context and to better predict response to PARP inhibitor therapy," Herrmann said. "Adopting spatial biology methods can help us gain pathophysiological insight into the biological processes involved in DNA repair in tumor tissue that may yield clinically actionable biomarkers to improve treatment selection and patient outcomes."