Highlights from 2nd Annual Microbiome, 4th Annual CDx, and Immuno-Oncology Summits

The co-located 2nd Annual Microbiome, 4th Annual CDx, and Immuno-Oncology summits in Vienna, Austria, were attended by members of the Fios team on October 3-4 2018. Attending two days of the conferences covered all three of the streams, with speakers coming from industry and academia.

2nd Annual Microbiome Summit

The first speaker of the day was Frédéric Baribaud from Janssen R&D, who asked whether a microbiome-focused approach to personalised medicine was reality or fiction. After presenting data demonstrating the effectiveness of fecal macrobiota transplant in irritable bowel disease, he concluded tentatively that the microbiome could be leveraged for diagnostics, but only following standardisation of protocols from sample collection to data processing; currently, comparability across studies is very limited. The morning continued with further examples of how the microbiome can play a role in therapies across diverse diseases.

Patrice Garnier of Amabiotics, who focus on microbiome-derived medicines targeting the Gut-Brain axis, described their potential first-in-class small molecule for Parkinson’s disease, AMA-101. He stated that AMA-101, a metabolite produced by healthy gut microbiota which travels to the brain, has the benefit of co-evolution with the host and as such toxicity is largely de-risked.

Shahram Lavansani of ImmuneBiotech, spoke about GutMagnificTM, a lactobacilli probiotic food supplement. Primarily for management of IBS, it also has implications for Leaky Gut Syndrome, a potential contributing factor in multiple sclerosis, as well as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Jean de Gunzberg of DaVolterra highlighted DAV132, an oral product to be co-administered with antibiotics that are known to trigger Clostridium difficile infection due to the disruption of the intestinal microbiota by the antibiotic.

Audrey Gueniche from L’Oreal Research and Innovation reported oral probiotics that can help to manage dandruff. Finally, Olga Sakwhinska of Nestle Research described how the addition of human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) to formula can restore the microbiome that is disrupted in babies that are delivered by C-section.

The summit came to an end with Bram Vanparys of the investment company Gimv, who gave a succinct summary of the work being carried out in the microbiome field – ‘bugs as drugs, drugs for bugs and bugs as delivery’. The take home message was clearly stated by Shahram Lavansani: we are in a microbiome revolution and while these may only be the early days, it is clear that the potential impact of microbiome developments could be far reaching, going much further than gut and skin health.

4th Annual CDx and Immuno-Oncology Summits

The morning talks covered various aspects of companion diagnostic development from a regulatory, legal and policy view point, with talks from Pfizer, Merck and Covington and Burling. After morning coffee, talks started on clinical and translational biomarkers in oncology and beyond. Kai Wilkens from Advanced Cell Diagnostics described RNAscope, an in situ hybridization assay for detection of target RNA within intact cells. RNAscope’s high sensitivity was demonstrated through the detection of HIV in patients who died with no detectable viral load and by discriminating between HPV types.

Following on, Christa Noehammer of the Austrian Institute of Technology, whose work focuses on the detection of biomarkers of all biomolecules for improving early cancer diagnostics, described successful proof of concept studies for diagnostic markers from saliva. This work included tumour-autoantibody, DNA-methylation and exosome-based biomarkers. Considering the data presented and the non-invasiveness nature of saliva biopsies, she clearly conveyed the potential power of saliva in biomarker development.

Post lunch, the talks initially focused on tissue sample collection and biobanking procedures. David Chafin of Roche stated that biomarkers are easier to find than well-preserved tissue samples, and as such standardisation of tissue preservation methods is essential.

The summit broke off into a second stream in the afternoon where two precision medicine-based talks were given. Christophe le Tourneau from Institut Curie gave an overview of high throughput sequencing and the impact it has had on precision medicine in oncology. He ended his talk by asserting that RNA and DNA sequencing should be performed in every patient with metastatic cancer. This was followed by Frédéric Baribaud, who had presented the previous day at the Microbiome Summit. He discussed personalised treatments in inflammatory diseases and introduced gene set variation analysis (GSVA) as an unbiased way to classify patients.

Overall, the two days in Vienna hosted a wide range of talks. They were all extremely interesting and informative, and it was enjoyable to be involved in all three streams in tandem.

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