Akoya Biosciences Inc. and The Spatial Biology Company? announced a collaboration with AstraZeneca to advance new multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) workflows and spatial biomarker signatures, based on Akoya’s Phenoptics? platform. The agreement between one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies and a top innovator in spatial biology technologies has the aim of elucidating the immune biology of cancer, in greater detail, to streamline drug development, clinical trials, and biomarker discovery.

Immunotherapies, a rapidly growing treatment modality, utilize the immune system to combat cancer and are revolutionizing the field of oncology. While they have shown tremendous promise, only a subset of patients achieves durable response, impacting drug efficacy rates and approvals. There is a pressing need for predictive biomarkers that can accurately stratify responders from non-responders. However, identifying suitable biomarkers requires an in-depth understanding of tumor pathophysiology. A recent multi-institutional study of immuno-oncology biomarker modalities found that mIF-based spatial biomarkers have the potential to address this gap by analyzing the spatial architecture of tumor tissue sections, and mapping how tumor and immune cells organize and interact within the tumor microenvironment.

With this collaboration, AstraZeneca’s immuno-oncology division will partner with Advanced Biopharma Solutions (ABS), an Akoya sevice, to leverage the comprehensive spatial phenotyping capabilities of the Phenoptics? platform to study drug mechanism of action, confirm target biology prevalence, and discover predictive signatures for subsequent trial designs. The aim of this collaboration will be the development and implementation of predictive assays and analysis frameworks to enable AstraZeneca, and the pharmaceutical industry in general, to advance a spatial biomarker-informed drug development strategy for immunotherapy.