OncoHost Awarded €2.5 Million Grant from the EIC Transition Programme to Advance Precision Oncology for Patients Receiving Immunotherapy

, ­/PRNewswire/ -- OncoHost, a technology company transforming the approach to precision medicine for improved patient outcomes, together with its esteemed partners Heidelberg University Hospital, European Institute of Oncology and Virgen Macarena University Hospital, announced today the parties have been awarded a €2.5 Million grant from the EIC Transition Program of Horizon Europe.

The grant received as a consortium will support OncoHost and the leading European medical centers, the development of a novel biomarker for predicting response to immunotherapy across five indications: Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), Renal cell carcinoma (RCC), Melanoma, Head and Neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) and Triple negative breast cancer. The consortium will be led and coordinated by OncoHost starting May 2025.

"As the absence of reliable and highly predictive biomarkers continues to be a significant challenge in immuno-oncology, we are consistently driving innovation and expanding our proprietary profiling platform, PROphet®, to address additional indications," said Ofer Sharon, MD, CEO of OncoHost. "The accepted grant underscores OncoHost's unwavering commitment to being at the forefront of precision medicine and empowering physicians with cutting-edge solutions and decision supporting tools."

Despite the remarkable success of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), their effectiveness remains confined to a subset of patients, emphasizing the importance of predictive biomarkers in clinical decision-making and further mechanistic understanding of treatment response. The novel biomarker currently under development is based on the identification of a specific subset of cells in the blood called Ly6E^hi neutrophils due to the high expression level of the Ly6E marker on their cell surface.

A recent publication in Cancer Cell (PMID 38181798) has shown that these cells serve as a strong pre-treatment biomarker for response to ICI treatment across different cancer types.

"This novel consortium funded by the European Union is a precious and unique opportunity to translate preclinical data into clinically validated biomarkers able to select the most appropriate therapy for cancer patients and avoid unnecessary side effects," emphasized Prof. Francesco Bertolini of the European Institute of Oncology.

Building on these findings, the consortium is planning to develop a novel test called NeutroFlow, which will serve as a simple-to-use, rapid, point-of-care method for predicting response to treatment. This unique neutrophil sub-population can be easily detected by flow cytometry, an instrument that is available in medical centers and is applied in different other clinical situations, thereby enabling a cost-effective test for accurately predicting therapeutic benefit from ICIs.

"We are looking forward to helping advance Neutroflow as the first cell-based immunotherapy biomarker into daily clinical practice in order to further personalize our patient care," said Prof. Petros Christopoulos of Heidelberg University.

"Participation in NeutroFlow will allow rapid clinical validation of a promising biomarker across multiple cancer types," said Dr. Alberto Moreno of Virgen Macarena University Hospital. "For patients, this means more accurate treatment selection; for clinicians, access to a practical decision-support tool. The involvement of a cross-disciplinary team ensures fast translation of research findings into real-world clinical practice."

The EIC Transition is a funding programme under Horizon Europe, the European Union's (EU's) key funding programme for research and innovation. The programme targets innovative activities that go beyond the experimental proof of principle in the laboratory and supports both the maturation and validation of novel technologies to the relevant application environments.

About OncoHost

OncoHost is a technology company headquartered in Binyamina, Israel, and Cary, North Carolina, transforming the approach to precision medicine for improved patient outcomes. OncoHost's proprietary platform, PROphet®, is a plasma-based, proteomic pattern analysis tool whose initial offering in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) uses a single blood sample to guide first-line immunotherapy decision-making. The PROphetNSCLC™ test provides clear clinical utility by offering physicians crucial guidance on the optimal first-line immunotherapy treatment plan for each individual patient, with a significant effect on overall survival. Led by an experienced team of entrepreneurs and industry experts and supported by a large-scale prospective clinical trial with over 40 sites and 1,700 patients recruited worldwide, OncoHost is well-positioned to lead precision diagnostics and biomarker development to the next stage.

For more information, visit www.oncohost.com, or follow OncoHost on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

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SOURCE OncoHost