St. Jude Researchers Use Mission Bio's Single-Cell DNA Platform to Elucidate Genomic Landscape of Pediatric ALL
Crucial targetable mutations tracked using Mission Bio's Tapestri® Platform for single-cell DNA sequencing
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Sept. 1, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Mission Bio, the pioneer in high-throughput single-cell DNA and multi-omics analysis, today announced new findings from researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and colleagues in Nature Genetics, using Mission Bio's Tapestri® Platform to help understand how mutations at the single-cell level drive cancer relapse in pediatric acute lymphoblastic cancer (ALL). This level of granularity is crucial to help understand how the cancer develops and to determine the best possible interventions for individual patients.
ALL is the most common type of cancer found in children, a type of cancer of the blood and bone marrow that affects white blood cells. If left untreated, too many immature white blood cells arise in the bone marrow and crowd out normal white blood cells, making it much harder for the body to fight infections.
In the paper, teams led by St. Jude's Jinghui Zhang and Charles Mullighan and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's Stephen Hunger sequenced DNA from more than 2700 patients and transcriptomes from almost 1900 patients, identifying several previously uncharacterized pathways and genes targeted by recurrent genomic alterations. Through greater understanding of the patterns of mutation associated with disease subtypes, the origin and development of mutations (mutational ontogeny), the role of different mutational processes, and the nature of clonal evolution, the researchers showed that many mutations commonly targeted in ALL may occur in different clones – findings that may help shape more personalized approaches to treatment. The data also suggest tracking patient mutations at the single-cell level during treatment could help monitor disease recurrence.
The study is the latest demonstration of how Mission Bio's Tapestri® Platform allows researchers to probe the fine details of cancer biology at a single-cell resolution not possible with bulk sequencing. Single-cell sequencing was used to examine the co-occurrence and possible exclusiveness of mutations, details that could not be resolved by non-single-cell sequencing approaches. This type of analysis is increasingly required by top-tier publications not only to provide insights into the presence of mutations but also to map the clonal evolution of cancer cells in disease. In turn, this is key to designing precision therapeutics for interventions and determining drivers of treatment relapse in patients.
"This type of analysis provides unique insight into clonal evolution and shows that kinase-related mutations, for example, are often secondary events and most frequently mutually exclusive," said Dr. Mullighan, who is Deputy Director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at St. Jude's and co-leads the hematological malignancies program. "Simultaneous targeted single cell DNA sequencing and cell-surface protein expression analysis reveal a correlation between immunophenotype and genotype within the same cell. This type of information is not only clinically relevant but potentially actionable and helps to fine-tune the expansive genomic landscape of pediatric ALL."
Todd Druley, Chief Medical Officer at Mission Bio, remarked: "This is a great example of how the Tapestri® Platform can be used to provide an unprecedented level of single cell information to oncologists, information that can help guide patient-specific treatments. The ability to identify and track targetable mutations in single cells offers a new dimension and specificity to the work of clinicians looking to identify the presence of residual or recurring cancer."
To learn more about Mission Bio and the Tapestri® Platform, please visit www.missionbio.com.
Mission Bio is a life sciences company that accelerates discoveries and cures for a wide range of diseases by equipping researchers with the tools they need to better measure and predict our resistance and response to new therapies. Mission Bio's multi-omics approach improves time-to-market for new therapeutics, including innovative cell and gene therapies that provide new pathways to health. Founded in 2014, Mission Bio has secured investment from Novo Growth, Cota Capital, Agilent Technologies, Mayfield Fund, and others.
The company's Tapestri® Platform gives researchers around the globe the power to interrogate every molecule in a cell together, providing a comprehensive understanding of activity from a single sample. Tapestri® is the only commercialized multi-omics platform capable of analyzing DNA and protein simultaneously from the same sample at single-cell resolution. The Tapestri® Platform is being utilized by customers at leading research centers, as well as pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies worldwide to develop treatments and eventually cures for cancer.
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