UNC Charlotte and biotech company BioCytics have launched a two-year research collaboration to investigate the genomic and immune mechanisms that drive cancer progression and treatment response.
The pair said in a statement they aim to develop a clinical decision support tool for personalised oncology.
The project, titled "Unlocking the Dark Genome of Cancer via Integrated Multi-Omics Platform of Discovery," brings together BioCytics, Carolina BioOncology Institute and UNC Charlotte to analyse clinical oncology samples using long-read sequencing, immune repertoire profiling and viral dark-genome discovery.
The research will be led by Dr Richard Allen White III, associate professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics at UNC Charlotte and Dr Renaud Warin, Chief Scientific Officer at BioCytics.
The team plans to characterise patient-specific immune repertoires and map viral elements within tumours, while developing a modular, containerised computational platform for automated quality control, variant calling, DNA methylation analysis and pathway reporting.
The ultimate goal is to generate a clinical decision support tool capable of producing a score indicating the likelihood that an individual patient will benefit from a particular therapy.
The research reflects growing interest in genomic regions and elements that have historically been difficult to characterise.
Long-read sequencing can preserve information across much longer stretches of DNA than conventional short-read approaches, potentially improving the detection of complex structural variants, genomic rearrangements and alterations in repetitive regions that can be challenging to resolve.
The cancer "dark genome" is also emerging as an area of interest for immuno-oncology research.
Transposable elements and endogenous viral elements, for example, can contribute to tumour biology and may generate antigens that could potentially be recognised by the immune system.
Recent research has highlighted their potential relevance to personalised cancer vaccines and other immune-based approaches.
According to BioCytics, identifying previously uncharacterised viral-driven mechanisms and antigens could support the discovery of immune cell populations with potential applications in its development pipeline.
The computational component will use Rust-based algorithms, with the partners citing the programming language’s memory safety, scalability and performance as advantages for clinical-grade bioinformatics workflows.
Dr White said: "The 'Rustification' of code related to biology is active and alive and currently providing major boosts to bio-analytics across the board."
BioCytics said the collaboration will ultimately seek to create comprehensive immune repertoire atlases and viral element maps, integrating genomic and immunological data to support translational decision-making in real-world clinical settings.
Dr Warin added: "Identifying new viral-driven mechanisms and antigens during cancer expansion and the resulting immune response would provide new opportunities for the identification and isolation of potent immune cell types, which would be extremely synergistic for BioCytics to expand its pipeline of candidate products."
