On April 27, 2023 Greg Sepich-Poore, Ph.D., Chief Analytic Officer and Co-founder of Micronoma, the first biotech company offering early cancer detection with a microbiome-driven, multi-omics liquid biopsy, reported the company’s impressive diagnostic capabilities in a presentation at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) (Free AACR Whitepaper)’s (AACR) (Free AACR Whitepaper) annual meeting in Orlando, Florida (Press release, Micronoma, APR 27, 2023, View Source [SID1234630645]). The recent work adds to the growing body of evidence demonstrating that microbial DNA associated with cancer can be exploited as a novel diagnostic modality.
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The talk, "Assessing the real-world utility of cell-free microbial DNA in diagnosing early-stage lung cancer," detailed the development of Micronoma’s Oncobiota test, a clinico-proteo-metagenomic assay that produced results exceeding the cancer diagnostic performance of PET-CT and clinical risk scores, as analyzed side-by-side in a blinded validation cohort of small lung nodules from patients with stage I cancers or lung diseases of diverse etiologies sized between 8-30 millimeters in diameter. The data presented also demonstrated how the Oncobiota assay, unlike other liquid biopsy assays for lung cancer, uses microbial signals to achieve histological subtype discrimination in lung cancer, providing robust differentiation of lung adenocarcinoma from squamous cell carcinoma (AUC 0.90, discovery cohort, AUC 0.86; blinded validation cohort), information that could aid clinicians in choosing the appropriate therapeutic options.
Overall, the presented work found strong diagnostic performance of cell-free metagenomes when evaluating an age-, sex-, and risk-matched and treatment-naive cohort of more than 1,000 patients with lung cancer, benign lung diseases, and no disease (healthy).
In addition, the research demonstrated the possibility and utility of performing metagenome assembly on more than 5,000 blood and tumor tissue samples, producing a proprietary metagenomic database with superior diagnostic power for nodule malignancy status compared to publicly available reference metagenomes.
"These data establish the utility of cell-free metagenomes as a generalizable and sensitive strategy for early lung cancer detection, warranting applications in additional cancer types," Sepich-Poore noted, pointing towards forthcoming work.