Telo Genomics Corp. announced that it has received the first patient sample for its clinical trial monitoring multiple myeloma ("MM") disease progression in post- treated patients. The study is being conducted in collaboration with McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, Canada. The previously announced study will be conducted prospectively on diagnosed MM patients eligible for bone marrow transplantation, aiming to measure and profile the measurable residual disease ("MRD") in these patients post transplantation. MRD refers to cancer cells that remain in the patient's system post-treatment. MRD testing has emerged as a crucial tool in assessing treatment response and guiding therapeutic decisions in oncology. With advancements in technology and a growing emphasis on personalized healthcare, the MRD testing industry is expected to witness substantial global expansion in the coming years. Telo's MRD study has two objectives that will potentially enable the development of two prognostic tests for monitoring myeloma MRD. The two objectives include: i) identify and quantify the number of MRD cells circulating in the patient's blood post marrow transplantation, over time, as an indicator of patient response to maintenance treatment; and ii) profile the isolated circulating MRD cells using the TeloView technology to assess disease aggressiveness in each individual MRD cell. The two MRD tests can be utilized independently or concurrently and are designed to be liquid biopsy-based, which is at the forefront of precision medicine. Monitoring MRD in oncology is evolving to be an important prognostic tool for monitoring treated patients to assess the effectiveness of the treatment in individual patients. Further, monitoring MRD in treated
cancer patients can also help in identifying patients at higher risk of relapse and potentially guide response-based treatment paradigms in several cancers including MM. In North America there are approximately 170,000 MM patients receiving treatment at any time across the different stages of the disease. Most of these patients may benefit from ongoing monitoring of treatment response using MRD assessment. To date, the prognostic power of MRD assessment is not fully realized in the clinic for MM patients and many other cancers, due to the limited capability of current technologies, which can only inform on MRD cell count (enumeration). Enumeration alone was proven in several cancers to be inadequate in providing accurate representation of the risk of disease progression. Furthermore, each of the current MRD assessment technologies has its own technical limitation rendering it inapplicable to several patient populations. TeloView technology employs a patented liquid biopsy enumeration methodology that will facilitate the quantification of MRD in the vast majority of MM patients. In addition, Telo's technology is unique because of it's potential to assess the genomic instability of each individual MRD cell using TeloView platform. Consequently, genomic instability profiling has the potential to provide a more accurate assessment of disease aggressiveness beyond merely the cell count, and has the potential to more accurately inform on the risk of disease progression.