NanoString Highlights Spatial Biology Research from the 2021 American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Conference

NanoString Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: NSTG), a leading provider of life science tools for discovery and translational research, today announced the highlights of spatial biology abstracts that will be presented at the 2021 meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), which will be held virtually from April 10 - 15, 2021.

The GeoMx® Digital Spatial Profiler (DSP) enables researchers to characterize tissue morphology to rapidly and quantitatively profile RNA and proteins. To date, NanoString and its collaborators have presented DSP data in dozens of abstracts at major scientific meetings and more than 45 peer-reviewed publications, demonstrating DSP’s utility to address a wide range of biological questions in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) and frozen tissues. At AACR 2021, eight abstracts that used GeoMx DSP will be presented during the poster session on Saturday, April 10.

Four of the eight abstracts will be presented by investigators from the GeoMx Breast Cancer Consortium (GBCC), an international network of breast cancer researchers. Their goal is to apply innovative approaches and decipher the spatial context of breast cancer to develop a comprehensive atlas and database of novel biomarkers for the disease.

GBCC Abstracts

Poster 2718: Digital spatial profiling in HER2 positive breast cancer: The road to precision medicine

In this work, the GeoMx DSP was used to profile 71 protein targets and gene expression profiling was done using NanoString's nCounter PanCancer IO360 assay for primary and metastatic tissues from human epidermal growth factor 2 positive (HER2+) breast cancer (BC) patients. A detailed characterization of carefully chosen immune cold, warm and hot regions of interest (ROI) in the tumor and tumor immune microenvironment of (HER2+) of these samples established that primary tumors had a higher number of immune cells than the metastatic sites. These findings, therefore, suggest that immunotherapy in early-stage BC could be more effective than in advanced BC.

Poster 2701: Molecular profiling to assess the immune response to neoadjuvant SABR in early breast cancer

NanoString's Human PanCancer immune profiling panel was used to assess the impact of localized radiotherapy to elicit an immune response in primary breast carcinomas before lumpectomy. They analyzed 25 patient samples for low-risk primary breast carcinomas from the SIGNAL 2.0 clinical trial using the GeoMx DSP platform, pre, and post stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT). Significant differences were found in the gene expression patterns in the immune microenvironment gene expression patterns and cellular composition after radiotherapy, demonstrating that SBRT treatment indeed evokes an immune response, increasing the innate immune response.

Poster 2698: Spatial gene expression profiling in breast cancer

Transcriptome profiling was performed for a cohort of breast cancer lumpectomies using the Cancer Transcriptomic Atlas (CTA) assay on the GeoMx DSP platform. Analysis of 60 patient samples revealed region-specific heterogeneity in unifocal and multifocal cancer tumors. This study demonstrates and establishes the importance of interactions between immune and tumor cells in the tumor microenvironment and the need to develop a strategy to stratify patients to available targeted therapies.

Poster 2726: Characterization of immune microenvironment and heterogeneity in breast cancer subtypes

In this work, the immune microenvironment of Luminal A, Luminal B, Basal, and HER2 tumor subtypes in a cohort of earl