Oncimmune Holdings PLC (LON:ONC) said it has signed its largest contract to date with Swiss pharma giant Roche to profile auto-antibodies in patient samples collected during cancer immunotherapy trials.
The new contract follows an initial project between the companies over the past two months and will enable further assessment of individual patient responses to immunotherapy through immune profiling.
Using its SeroTag biomarker discovery platform, Oncimmune said it will explore baseline and on-treatment autoantibody profiles as biomarkers in patients that received cancer immunotherapy.
The contract involves a substantial upfront payment, added the AIM-listed group and starts immediately.
Initial results are scheduled to be provided to Roche within three months and the project to be completed by November.
In a statement, Adam Hill, Oncimmune’s chief executive said: "This significant contract with Roche not only builds upon the excellent collaborative work between the Oncimmune and Roche teams in recent months, but it strikes to the heart of understanding as to why cancer patients have differing responses to the same immunotherapy.
"Since acquiring Oncimmune Germany last year, we have grown the pipeline of potential commercial projects with major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and this contract, the largest we have signed to date, provides further evidence of our ability to convert pipeline opportunities into contracted revenues.”