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Category: Educational Webinar

Discovery of immune-related adverse event associations in metastatic melanoma

Posted on by Carlos Medina

About the Webinar

About ~40-60%[1] of first-line metastatic melanoma patients receive immunotherapy. But depending on the type of treatment, between 15-50% of those patients will have a severe immune-related adverse event of grade 3 or higher. These aren’t headaches either; the adverse events are serious, like Grade 3 hepatitis or colitis. These kinds of events “interfere with a person’s ability to do basic things like eat or get dressed.”[2] The problem is, drug developers and doctors don’t know which kind of patients will experience these adverse events. That’s why we’re attempting to crack this problem, by looking at immune signatures found in the blood of melanoma patients.

In this recorded live webinar, Ramji Srinivasan, cofounder and CEO of Teiko Bio, shares original research on blood-based biomarkers of immune-related adverse events in metastatic melanoma performed by Teiko scientists in collaboration with Dr. Siwen Hu-Lieskovan of Huntsman Cancer Institute.

About the Speaker

Before Teiko, Ramji was Cofounder, CEO and Chairman of Counsyl, a women’s health genetic screening laboratory. Counsyl screened over 1M prospective parents, mothers-to-be and women at risk of hereditary cancer. In 2018, Counsyl was acquired by Myriad Genetics, Inc for $375M in cash and stock.

Ramji earned a B.S. in computer science and an M.S. in financial mathematics, both from Stanford University. Ramji also attended Stanford’s Graduate School of Business before dropping out to start Counsyl.

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What looking beyond the tumor microenvironment has taught us about immunotherapy

Posted on by Carlos Medina

About the Webinar

Immunotherapies work solely by activating immune cells within the tumor – or do they? In this webinar, Dr. Jolien Sweere walks us through a number of scientific studies published within the last 6 years showing that immune responses outside the tumor are necessary for effective immunotherapy. She also highlights more recent work, including work done by Teiko Bio, that found peripheral immune features associated with improved clinical outcomes and presentation of immune related adverse events.

About the Speaker

Jolien Sweere, PhD completed her doctoral training in Immunology at Stanford University in the laboratory of Paul Bollyky. During her PhD, she found that a type of temperate filamentous bacteriophage that infects Pseudomonas aeruginosa is associated with chronic human wound infections. Her work was published in Science in 2019.

After completing her PhD, Jolien worked as a Life Sciences commercial strategy consultant at Charles River Associates in San Francisco. She joined Teiko Bio in 2022 as a Senior Scientist, Medical Strategy.

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Illustration. In the center is a grey mass labeled "tumor" under a magnifying glass. Inside the tumor are three grey cells all with "zzz" above them. Outside the magnifying glass (and therefore outside the tumor) in the four corners are different depictions. Top left shows three red cells and is labeled "novel T cell clones". Top right shows a lymph node with red T cell zones and the words "LN trafficking required". Bottom right shows two red T cells in a blood vessel labeled "LAG-3 and CD8+" with the words "peripheral biomarkers". Bottom left shows a spleen with the same grey, sleeping T cells. There's a red lightning bolt and the words "impaired systemic immune response in cancer".

Peripheral blood analysis is key to developing effective cancer immunotherapies

Although most research focuses on tumor-killing immune cells at the site of the tumor, new research increasingly demonstrates the value of studying circulating immune cells in peripheral blood to identify new therapeutic targets to enhance tumor-killing immune responses. We highlight recent publications with peripheral blood biomarkers and discuss recommendations for how to incorporate peripheral blood immune profiling into your drug development pipeline.

Immune responses to cancer immunotherapy outside the tumor

Posted on by Carlos Medina

About the Webinar

In this educational webinar, Matthew Spitzer, PhD, reviews the current body of literature focused on answering the question “where do T cells get activated after cancer immunotherapy?” He also discusses his lab’s recent contribution in Cell (Rahim, Okholm, & Jones et al. 2023), which shows that successful T cell activation can be detected via peripheral blood immune profiling and that lymph node metastases can severely impair these processes. Read Teiko’s synopsis and highlights of Rahim, Okholm, & Jones et al. here.

About the Speaker

Matt Spitzer, PhD completed his training in Immunology at Stanford University in the laboratories of Garry Nolan and Edgar Engleman. There, he developed experimental and analytical methods to model the state of the immune system using high dimensional single-cell data. At Stanford, he also developed new strategies for inducing powerful immune responses against cancer.

Matt moved to UCSF in the summer of 2016 as a UCSF Parker Fellow and a Sandler Faculty Fellow and is now an Associate Professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and Microbiology & Immunology and an investigator of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Matt is the scientific cofounder of Teiko Bio.

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Illustration. In the center is a grey mass labeled "tumor" under a magnifying glass. Inside the tumor are three grey cells all with "zzz" above them. Outside the magnifying glass (and therefore outside the tumor) in the four corners are different depictions. Top left shows three red cells and is labeled "novel T cell clones". Top right shows a lymph node with red T cell zones and the words "LN trafficking required". Bottom right shows two red T cells in a blood vessel labeled "LAG-3 and CD8+" with the words "peripheral biomarkers". Bottom left shows a spleen with the same grey, sleeping T cells. There's a red lightning bolt and the words "impaired systemic immune response in cancer".

Peripheral blood analysis is key to developing effective cancer immunotherapies

Although most research focuses on tumor-killing immune cells at the site of the tumor, new research increasingly demonstrates the value of studying circulating immune cells in peripheral blood to identify new therapeutic targets to enhance tumor-killing immune responses. We highlight recent publications with peripheral blood biomarkers and discuss recommendations for how to incorporate peripheral blood immune profiling into your drug development pipeline.