The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has exclusively licensed two key cancer immunotherapy technologies to MIODx, a company that focuses on the discovery of early detection and prognostic cancer biomarkers. MIODx uses high throughput immune sequencing to generate information on T cell and B cell diversity that is then applied to monitoring a patient’s response to immunotherapy. Both technologies licensed from UCSF are expected to add to this capability. The first technology provides a method to monitor a patient for response to immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy such as PD-L1 and CTLA-4. The second license extends the technology with a method to detect if a patient is likely to have an immune-related adverse event from his or her immuno-therapy regimen.

“Diagnostic assays that help guide immuno-therapies represent a huge unmet clinical need,” said Lawrence Fong, MD, a science advisor to MIODx and leader of the Cancer Immunotherapy Program at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCSF. “Rather than treating all patients, we need to select patients who can respond to these treatments as well as determine which patients may develop side effects.”