In this era of immunotherapy, many spatial technologies have emerged to facilitate the study of the tumor microenvironment. These technologies enable simultaneous detection of multiple markers on a single tissue section, as well as comprehensive study of cell composition, cellular functional and cell-cell interactions. Due to the high flexibility of marker matching and cost effectiveness, some techniques have translational potential to the clinic. More importantly, since it leverages on clinical auto-stainer and digital pathology pipeline, it has the ability to incorporate standardized automation and is auditable.
For almost a decade till date, we have employed multiplex IHC/IF in the Anatomical Pathology Lab of Singapore General Hospital using clinical auto-stainers. Furthermore, due to the close proximity of the National Cancer Centre Singapore to the hospital, this technique has also been adopted into routine clinical trials – especially in our Phase 1 unit such as IMPACT (Individualized Molecular Profiling for Allocation to Clinical Trials project). Thus far, this lab-developed assay has been embraced by private diagnostic companies and hospitals in the region for reporting PD-L1 multiple clones in the tissue-limiting scenario. More recently, the Singapore Translational Cancer Consortium under the Ministry of Health has taken on this technique to be one of the official profiling platform for multi-PD-L1 testing.
In this webinar, we will be sharing our experiences from this up-and-down journey and also a glimpse of other lab-developed assays that are underway. We hope that through this unique experience, we can garner interest to bring spatial tech to the clinic, as well as to build a community that can learn from each other to design, standardize, and perform QA/QC. Of course, the ultimate goal is to help oncologists and patients identify the best management strategies.