Molecule to Medicine has joined a coalition of universities, hospitals, and industry from across the UK which has come together to found a groundbreaking new initiative dedicated to advancing the understanding of immunotherapy as a cancer treatment.

MTM’s work directly contributes to the development of personalized, more effective therapies.

‍

‍

The Multiomic Analysis of Immunotherapy Features Evidencing Success and Toxicity (MANIFEST) initiative is to be led by The Francis Crick Institute and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, and has received a combined £21.9 million from the Medical Research Council and industry partners.

Drugs that use a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer, called immunotherapies, have proven incredibly powerful in the treatment of certain kinds of cancer, such as melanoma. They have even, in some cases, shown life-saving efficacy against advanced cancers. Despite their powerful nature, however, they do not work for all patients, even for cancers such as melanoma where they are particularly effective.

‍

‍

The MANIFEST initiative will leverage MTM’s bioinformatics capabilities to discover what makes a patient responsive to immunotherapy. The initiative seeks to identify specific biomarkers that can signal to healthcare providers whether a patient is a good candidate for immunotherapy and potentially identify alternative avenues of treatment and further research.

MTM's cross-functional expertise, experience of diverse data integration, and focus on translational research, potentiated by advanced analytical tools and collaborative ecosystem structure, will enable the MANIFEST initiative to provide clinicians with potential to predict patient outcomes across a range of treatment options. Participation and contribution to the initiative align with the MTM vision to drive better outcomes in drug discovery and development via data and prediction.

The MANIFEST initiative is able to promise such revolutionary change due to its unprecedented breadth. The initiative, which brings together more than 45 partner organizations and which will study a cohort of 6,000 patients over the next four years, will leverage this breadth to generate disease insights and predictors of patient response to therapy which will help each patient access the treatments which will be most effective for them.

‍

‍

“Previously, many such studies have been pursued primarily in smaller cohorts of patients who take a specific therapy, limiting the depth of insights generated via computational analysis of related datasets. The MANIFEST initiative will generate and integrate cellular and molecular profiling data from patients’ tumour, blood and stool samples, at scale.The diversity of data and size of the cohort generated by MANIFEST will enable inter-disciplinary initiative research to yield previously unattainable depth of insight and predictive power.” - MTM Lead Bioinformatician Dr. Danish Memon, in describing what sets MANIFEST apart in the field of immuno-oncology studies.

‍

‍

The MTM ecosystem model is founded on access to large and diverse datasets and the translation of that data into innovation. This approach allows us to, in the words of MTM Head of Bioinformatics Dr. Mitul Patel, “leverage our expertise in data integration, platform development, and cross-functional collaboration to enable data sharing, integration, and leverage between the MANIFEST initiative stakeholders.”

“The work of MTM contributes directly to the development of personalized, more effective therapies. Ultimately, this approach can accelerate the delivery of targeted treatments, reduce trial-and-error in therapeutic strategies, and contribute to better outcomes for patients.” Dr. Patel said, emphasizing the importance of the initiative and MTM’s role in it. “Through these contributions, MTM is helping advance precision medicine within the MANIFEST initiative, bringing us closer to better, faster, and more effective therapies for patients.”

‍