Orion, the new tool to diagnose cancer

To diagnose, evaluate and determine the degree of extension of a cancer (stage), pathologists have used histology for over a hundred years. Now a team of researchers has developed a new tool that could revolutionize the study of cancer.

The tool, called Orion, is a powerful digital imaging platform that combines information obtained through traditional histology with molecular imaging, giving the pathologist deeper insight into tumor type, behavior, and potential response to treatment.

The research, conducted by Sandro Santagata, associate professor of pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and co-senior author of the paper with Peter Sorger, Otto Krayer Professor of Systems Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, was published Thursday in Nature Cancer.

The researchers tested the tool by analyzing tumor samples from more than 70 colorectal cancer patients; Orion provided complementary histological and molecular information on each tumor sample and identified the biomarkers that were most common in patients with severe disease.

These biomarkers or natural markers consisted of specific combinations of tumor characteristics (usually based on the number and properties of immune cells and other cells) that predicted the outcome of colorectal cancer patients.

The researchers believe that with some further enhancements, Orion will in the future enable the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases to be improved by providing physicians with additional details about tumors or other patient samples.

More importantly, this detailed information could reveal features and patterns that help scientists develop biomarkers to better predict how a disease will behave and personalize treatments for patients.

orion’s test

The authors have spent years developing tools to image human tissue samples. Recently, they published in the journal Cell a multiplexed imaging technique called cyclic immunofluorescence (CyCif) that, combined with histology, allowed colorectal cancer to be mapped.

His maps, freely available online to other scientists, provide an unprecedented level of detail about tumors, with information about their spatial arrangement, their formation and evolution, and their interaction with various immune cells.

But the scientists wanted to go further and provide a single image to doctors in charge of examining tumor samples to diagnose and treat patients.

Jia-Ren Lin, lead author of the study and platform director of the HMS Systems Pharmacology Laboratory, collaborated with the company RareCyte to develop a digital imaging platform capable of rapidly collecting and analyzing histology and multiple immunofluorescence images from the same tissue sample.

The result is Orion, which completely merges the two modalities and generates a single digital image that integrates the information from the two techniques.

Although Orion is still in the early stages of development, the authors say that the results obtained so far are proof of principle that the platform can be useful in the clinic.

The team plans to refine Orion by testing it in a larger number of patients because scaling the platform to make it faster and cheaper will be key to bringing it to the clinic, they say.

They also plan to test Orion in other types of cancer, such as lung cancer and melanoma, and eventually move to other diseases such as kidney and neurodegenerative cancers, which could also benefit from it. a dual histological and molecular profile to determine its stage and severity.

In addition, they hope that the conclusions drawn from Orion in the clinic will serve to guide the basic scientific research they carry out in the laboratory.

Source: EFE