TELO GENOMICS CORP. Telo Genomics Corp. announce that it is launching a clinical trial to monitor multiple myeloma disease progression in post-treated patients, by measuring and profiling the minimal residual disease in these patients. The clinical trial is being conducted in collaboration with McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, Canada.
The study will be conducted prospectively on diagnosed MM patients eligible for bone marrow transplantation, it has two objectives that will potentially enable TELO to develop two prognostic tests for monitoring myeloma MRD. MRD refers to myeloma plasma cells that remained in the patient's system post treatment. The two objectives include: i) quantify the number of MRD cells circulating in the patient's blood post treatment, and ii) profile the circulating MRD cells using TeloView technology to assess disease aggressiveness in individual MRD cells.
The two MRD tests for MM 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 assessing the depth of a patient's response to treatment; it can also help in identifying patients at higher risk of relapse and potentially guide response-based treatment paradigms in several hematological disorders including MM. In North America there are approximately 180,000 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, this is due to the limited capability of the current technologies, which can only inform on MRD cell count (enumeration). Enumeration alone was proven over the years 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 MM 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 can assess the genomic instability of the MRD cells using TeloView technology, which has the potential to provide accurate assessment of disease aggressiveness beyond merely the cell count and has the potential to more accurately inform on the risk of disease progression.
Telo Genomics anticipates receiving the first patient samples during First Quarter of 2023. The clinical validation of the first MRD test in development, focused on MRD enumeration, is expected to be completed within 12-18 months, followed by the validation of the second test using TeloView to profile the genetic instability of the MRD cells.
