Johns Hopkins Awarded $10M for Genomics, Immunotherapy Research

The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (BKI) awarded $10 million to The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to accelerate groundbreaking genomics and immunotherapy research.

The collaboration builds on an existing partnership between The Mark Foundation and JHU, which for the past three years has focused on improving knowledge of how tumors respond to immunotherapy. By adding BKI to the collaboration, researchers hope to build on previous work and accelerate the development of next-generation genomics and imaging platforms for cancer immunotherapies over the next five years.

According to the American Cancer Society, immunotherapy has become an important part of treating some types of cancer, as these treatments work better for some types of cancer than for others. Immunotherapy can be used on its own or combined with other treatments depending on the type and severity of the cancer.

Currently, 15 to 20 percent of patients achieve positive results with immunotherapy, which has demonstrated significant success in treating skin, lung, kidney, bladder, and other cancers. Research from The Mark Foundation and BKI has demonstrated that giving immunotherapy before surgery can significantly reduce the size of tumors and, in some cases, eliminate or decrease relapse from undetected metastases.

A key part of the collaboration’s work will revolve around studying how cancer evades the immune system and spreads, in addition to why certain patients do not respond to immunotherapy. By utilizing technologies such as single cell genomics, high dimensional computational techniques such as artificial intelligence, and imaging platforms, researchers hope to simplify complex interactions between the immune system and tumors.

Researchers are currently using one such imaging platform to examine the tumor microenvironment. AstroPath is a cancer-imaging platform that translates technology designed to ascertain the positions of galaxies in space into algorithms that can evaluate the spatial relations of tumors. The platform’s algorithms can analyze hundreds of millions of cells, giving researchers a detailed picture of the tumor’s location within the body and its interactions with surrounding tissues.

“AstroPath’s imaging algorithms provide 1,000 times more information from a single biopsy than is currently available through routine pathology. This information is game-changing in determining who is likely to respond to immunotherapy,” stated Janis Taube, MD, professor of dermatology and pathology at JHU and co-director of the Tumor Microenvironment Laboratory at BKI. “The expanded collaboration allows us to uncover why some patients have such remarkable responses when so many others do not. We are committed to finding new ways to intercept cancer, making immunotherapies work better.”

Of the $10 million investment, The Mark Foundation is donating $6 million and BKI is providing $4 million, and the findings of the collaboration will be used to support cancer immunotherapy clinical trials.