Biomarkers & Precision Medicine US 2025

Characterizing the tumor microenvironment in clinical trials by combining 17-plex fluorescent immunohistochemistry and cellular neighborhood analyses
Monday, October 27
3:25 pm

Understanding the intricacies between tumor microenvironments (TMEs) and immune cell infiltrates is critical for designing next-generation, immune-modulating therapies. We validated a clinical grade, 17-plex tumor immune landscape assay to characterize T-cells, B-cells, myeloid cells, plasma cells, and tumor cells across five major cancer types using the OrionTM platform. The panel design includes nine immune, five functional/checkpoint and three structural markers. The assay was found to be reproducible across staining runs for all biomarkers when tested on non-small cell lung cancer, breast carcinoma, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer and melanoma formalin-fixed, paraffin embedded tissue sections. Resulting OrionTM images were analyzed to generate cell phenotypes and the TME was characterized using cellular neighborhoods using spatial cellular graph partitioning (SCGP) on the segmented fluorescent immunohistochemistry (FIHC) data. We identified twelve TMEs within the analyzed cancer samples with our validated, 17-plex FIHC assay. We expect these novel algorithms to be useful for gaining new insights into tumor biology and tissue/immune architecture, aiding the development of next-generation Immuno-Oncology therapies.