Our Technology

Addressing Challenges in Immuno-oncology

Seeing the intimate interactions between the immune system and cancer is important to drug discovery, however, current in vivo and in vitro models derived from cell lines and animal models fail to accurately reflect the true environment. This makes it difficult to get close to a drug’s actual effect, resulting in inaccurate studies, meaning extended timelines and wasted resources.

Nilogen’s proprietary ex vivo assays utilize 3D tumor microspheroids prepared from fresh patient tumors with an intact tumor immune microenvironment. Through the correlation of the ex vivo tumor drug response with the characteristics of the tumor microenvironment, Nilogen aims to identify and validate biomarkers of drug sensitivity and resistance.

Acquiring and processing fresh patient tissue is a prospect too challenging for many, but our deep experience and know-how in this area enables us to collect fresh tumor samples in a sterile manner from prominent medical centers in the United States. Patient privacy is protected by an IRB-approved tissue procurement protocol. Tumors of all types can be used for drug and biomarker studies, but the most commonly requested immunogenic cancer types are non-small cell lung cancer, bladder cancer and kidney cancer.

Using fresh patient tissue sample is where it all begins. From there, we use the following complementary platforms utilizing cutting-edge technologies in next-generation sequencing, Nanostring gene expression profiling, flow cytometry, multiplex cytokine assays, mass spectrometry, immunohistochemistry and many more to help our research partners take their most promising therapies from preclinical data to clinical results.