ABACUS Spatial Transcriptomics
Research type
Research Study
Full title
ABACUS Spatial Transcriptomics
IRAS ID
312373
Contact name
Thomas Powles
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Queen Mary University London
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 28 days
Research summary
ABACUS was a phase II study which has been published in Nature Medicine (1). It looked at the activity of neoadjuvant atezolizumab in bladder cancer. The trial was positive and has led to a number of phase III studies. ABACUS had an extensive biomarker component which was pre-planned as part of the study. This included measuring gene expression (using bulk transcriptomics), DNA changes (using Foundation One analysis) and protein expression (using immunohistochemistry).
One of the problems with the RNA expression data in ABACUS is that the technology used at the time lacked accuracy. There are now new techniques of exploring this called ‘spatial transcriptomics’. The process of performing spatial transcriptomics is very similar to the previous technique (bulk transcriptomics) in that RNA is extracted from the cancer tissue and then analysed in a similar way. The main difference is we can now identify which part of the cancer the RNA comes from (individual cancers have areas which are different from one another). This will give us more accurate results than the RNA analysis. We therefore wish to go back to this tissue and perform spatial transcriptomics and then analyse the results in a similar way to the original RNA analysis.REC name
London - London Bridge Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/PR/0714
Date of REC Opinion
10 Jun 2022
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion