Oncimmune Regulatory News (ONC)

22 July 2021

Oncimmune Holdings plc

("Oncimmune" or the "Company")

Paper validates the ImmunoINSIGHTS Infectious Diseases service in COVID-19

Paper reveals a remarkable sex-specific prevalence and selectivity of autoantibody responses to SARS-CoV-2

Oncimmune Holdings plc (AIM: ONC.L), the leading global immunodiagnostics group, is pleased to announce the pre-publication of the first results from its collaboration with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, entitled: "Paradoxical Sex-Specific Patterns of Autoantibodies Response to SARS-CoV-2 Infection"1. The paper focuses on the characterisation of sex-specific prevalence and selectivity of autoantibody responses to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an unprecedented number of initiatives from the life sciences industry and research institutions to understand and respond to the effects of COVID-19, but despite first generation vaccines now being deployed to fight the disease, the need to expand our understanding of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 still exists. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of the SeroTagTM Infectious Diseases discovery array to enable a better understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 stimulates the immune reaction and predicts responses to vaccines and therapeutics against the virus.

The aim of this initial research project was to use the SeroTag Infectious Diseases discovery array to detect autoantibodies to over 90 antigens previously linked to a range of classic autoimmune diseases. The researchers sought to comprehensively examine the diversity of autoantibody responses in male and female health care workers who were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and were asymptomatic, or experienced minor symptoms.

The paper reveals a remarkable sex-specific prevalence and selectivity of autoantibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 and concludes that further understanding of the nature of triggered and persistent autoantibody activation among men and women exposed to SARS-CoV-2 will be essential for developing effective interventions against both acute, and chronic immune-mediated sequelae of COVID-19.

Dr Adam M Hill, CEO of Oncimmune said: "Our work with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is developing very novel insights that will have an important bearing on the management of both short, and long term sequelae of the disease. I am delighted that the earliest work packages from our ImmunoINSIGHTS Infectious Disease panel are now being translated into scientific publications, contributing to the knowledge base in order to improve clinical outcomes from the disease. I look forward to reading more from this most active of collaborations shortly."

1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.15.21260603v1 

For further information:

Oncimmune Holdings plc

Dr Adam M Hill, Chief Executive Officer

Matthew Hall, Chief Financial Officer

contact@oncimmune.co.uk

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+44 (0)20 3829 5000

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About Oncimmune

Oncimmune is a leading immunodiagnostics developer, primarily focused on the growing fields of immuno-oncology, autoimmune disease and infectious diseases. Oncimmune has a diversified and growing revenue from its portfolio of diagnostic products to detect early-stage cancer and a contract discovery and development service-based platform, delivering actionable insights into therapies to its pharmaceutical and biotech partners.

Our understanding of the immune system enables us to harness its sophisticated response to disease to detect cancer earlier and to support the development of better therapies. The key to improving cancer survival is early detection and better selection for therapy. As a company, we are driven by our passion to improve cancer survival and to give people extra time.

Oncimmune's ImmunoINSIGHTS platform enables life science organisations to optimise drug development and delivery, leading to more effective targeted as well as safer treatments for patients. Oncimmune's immunodiagnostic technology, EarlyCDT, can detect and help identify cancer on average four years earlier than standard clinical diagnosis. Our lead diagnostic test, EarlyCDT Lung, targets a vast market estimated to grow to £3.8bn by 2024. With over 200,000 tests already performed for patients worldwide and its use being supported by peer reviewed data in over 12,000 patients, we are poised to become an integral component of future lung cancer detection programmes, globally.

Oncimmune, headquartered at its laboratory facility in Nottingham, UK, and has a discovery research centre in Dortmund, Germany.

For more information, visit www.oncimmune.com

What is ImmunoINSIGHTS?

The ImmunoINSIGHTS service business leverages Oncimmune's technology platform and methodologies across multiple diseases, to offer life-science organisations actionable insights for therapies across the development and product lifecycle. Our core immune-profiling technology is underpinned by our library of over eight thousand immunogenic proteins, one of the largest of its kind. This helps identify trial participants and patients into clinically relevant subgroups, enabling development of targeted and more effective treatments.

What is SeroTag?

Oncimmune's proprietary biomarker discovery engine, which is leveraged in our ImmunoINSIGHTS services to discover and validate novel biomarkers can help stratify patients in multiple cancer indications and with different autoimmune diseases.

This high-throughput, multiplex technology is based on one of the largest, in-house protein libraries, as well as a unique, ever-growing repository of disease data for indications including, but not limited to, autoimmune diseases and cancer. As a result, SeroTag is helping to address and monitor a number of challenges currently hindering the successful development and broader application of both cancer immunotherapies and treatments for autoimmune diseases.

The platform is being applied to discover and validate biomarkers and develop precision diagnostic tools from minimally invasive liquid biopsies. SeroTag analyses autoantibodies-some of the most stable analytes-and is used most frequently for the identification of IgG isoforms, in addition to IgM and IgA, from just a few drops of serum.

The SeroTag platform acts as the primary discovery engine that feeds into the creation of Oncimmune's NavigAID disease-specific stratification panels-precision medicine tools which are enabling patient and disease stratification and support therapeutic development.