OncoHost, Hospital Partners Nab €2.5M Grant for Cancer Treatment Biomarker Development

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NEW YORK – OncoHost said Thursday that it and three partner medical centers will use a €2.5 million ($2.80 million) grant from the EU's European Innovation Council Transition program to develop a biomarker-based test to predict patient response to immunotherapies for five cancer indications.

EIC Transition is part the EU's Horizon Europe funding program. OncoHost, which has offices in Israel and North Carolina, will lead and coordinate the project beginning this month with partners at Heidelberg University Hospital, the European Institute of Oncology, and Virgen Macarena University Hospital.

The partners plan to study the use of a test for the identification of Ly6E(hi) neutrophils as a biomarker for treatment response among patients with non-small cell lung cancer, renal cell carcinoma, melanoma, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, and triple-negative breast cancer. The results will support the development of a cost-effective point-of-care flow cytometry test, dubbed NeutroFlow, the company said.

OncoHost CEO Ofer Sharon said in a statement that the absence of reliable and highly predictive biomarkers remains a challenge in immuno-oncology and the firm is expanding its PROphet profiling platform to address additional indications. The company's initial offering through that platform, PROphetNSCLC, is a test that is used to aid decisions on the use of first-line immunotherapies for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer.

OncoHost said late last year that it had received College of American Pathologists accreditation for the North Carolina-based lab where it runs its proteomic PROphet blood test for the measurement of 7,000 proteins and analysis of expression patterns to determine whether a patient is likely to respond to certain therapies.

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