NantHealth announces publication of RNA sequencing study

NantHealth announced the publication of a study that revealed RNA sequencing is not only viable but may also provide clinical value in analyzing a cancer patient's specific disease biology to enable an optimized treatment decision with a higher likelihood of success. The study was published in Nature's Scientific Reports, an open access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to original research from across all areas of the natural and clinical sciences. Prepared in collaboration with NantOmics and ImmunityBio, the study was designed to explore the potential use of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded, or FFPE-derived, RNA transcriptome profiling for clinical decision-making. This technique was previously not considered to yield significant clinical value due to the lower quality, degraded samples typically produced by the formalin fixation process. FFPE is the most common method used in clinical settings for storing tumor biopsies. The study revealed an overall sequencing success rate of 81% with highly consistent coverage in direct FFPE and fresh-frozen, or FF, replicates. The results provide strong rationale for the use of FFPE-derived RNA sequencing in clinical decision-making based on the reproducibility, robustness, and consistency of whole transcriptome profiling. This research enables the comparison of clinical samples to research studies, which generally differ in both data collection and sequencing methods, and which may unlock highly valuable insights that would not be possible with DNA sequencing techniques alone. The study also demonstrates that RNA sequencing is not only clinically viable but valuable and can provide a more thorough understanding of what genes are driving each individual patient's tumor to better inform personalized treatment decisions. To achieve this, researchers performed ribo-deplete RNA extractions on more than 3,200 FFPE slide samples to measure the expression of clinically significant genes that help identify treatments with the highest likelihood of response. The study included a comprehensive evaluation of RNA extraction methods by comparing transcriptomes from The Cancer Genome Atlas, or TCGA, cohort and 3,116 FFPE samples. Findings showed minimal differences between the two approaches within clinically important genes, while establishing a computational framework for comparing the expression of FFPE clinical samples to the growing database of research samples generated by academic studies.