
Bio-Techne to Showcase Spatial Biology Solutions in Cancer at SITC Meeting; Working Toward Multiomic Automated Solution Following Lunaphore Acquisition
Bio-Techne Corporation has announced new data on its Lunaphore product line will be presented at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer’s (SITC) 38th Annual Meeting in San Diego from November 1-5, 2023. The new studies will spotlight COMET™ product suite for spatial biology.
Bio-Techne recently acquired Lunaphore, a Swiss-based company founded in 2014. The company’s technologies allow researchers to unlock proteomic and transcriptomic biomarkers in tumors and tissues, providing insights at single-cell and subcellular levels. The company is focused on therapeutic development in the fields of immunology, immuno-oncology, and neuroscience. Lunaphore’s instrument, the COMET™, is a fully automated spatial biology platform designed for staining, imaging, and image preprocessing. This high-throughput instrument delivers high levels of automation for tissue morphology analysis. Notably, the COMET™ eliminates the need to conjugate antibodies, a process of linking an antibody to a specific tag or label, making it more efficient. The system can analyze up to 40 spatial biomarkers per sample in a single automated run. Lunaphore’s portfolio also includes SPYRE™ antibody panel kits and HORIZON™ image analysis software. In addition, they offer LabSat®, an automated tissue staining instrument with 30-minute turnaround time.
Prior to the acquisition, Lunaphore’s had signed a partnership with Bio-Techne to create the first fully automated spatial multiomic workflow combining Lunaphore’s COMET™ instrument and SPYRE™ antibody panels with Bio-Techne’s RNAscope HiPlex technology which measures gene expression targets for single cell analysis. The partnership seeks to create an automated solution for the simultaneous detection of protein and RNA biomarkers on the same slide at single-cell resolution.
Lunaphore’s symposia at the event will focus on optimizing innovative anti-cancer therapy approaches, particularly for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Researchers from the collaborative project between the Earle A. Chiles Research Institute, a division of Providence Cancer Institute, and Lunaphore will unveil the results of a hyperplex-based analysis of the tumor microenvironment (TME) in response to combined immunotherapy and stereotactic ablative radiation therapy (iSABR) neoadjuvant treatment of HNSCC. The presentation will highlight strategies for the rapid development and optimization of hyperplex sequential immunofluorescence (seqIF™) panels, along with methodologies for high-throughput data analytics.
Additionally, several poster presentations will demonstrate how research institutes harness their off-the-shelf antibodies with the COMET™ system to map immune and tumoral cells in lymphomas and various cancer tissues using the seqIF™ approach. Moreover, a poster highlighting an industry partnership will illustrate a proof-of-concept COMET™ workflow, showcasing a same-slide, fully automated multiomics analysis of the TME using both Lunaphore and Bio-Techne products.