PENSACOLA, Florida. and BENGALURU, India, APRIL 19, 2026. Farcast Biodynamics presented new data at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2026 in San Diego, highlighting two independent studies in which its TruTumor technology demonstrated that response to immune checkpoint blockade is governed by where immune cells are located, how exhausted they are, and whether they are organized into lymphoid structures, rather than by how many are present.

Response to anti-PD-1 therapy in HNSCC remains unpredictable. Standard biomarkers such as PD-L1, tumor mutational burden, and infiltration scores measure presence, not function or position. The tumor microenvironment (TME) is an active system, making it difficult to characterize with just one or two variables. Farcast’s TruTumor technology preserves the native architecture of a patient's tumor sample, including immune, stromal, and matrix compartments, and was used to divide a single biopsy across untreated, nivolumab, and nivolumab plus ipilimumab arms. Within 72 hours, each arm yielded four matched data layers from the same tissue: pathologist-scored cytotoxicity, Luminex MAGPIX multiplex cytokines, flow cytometry immune phenotyping, and same-cell spatial multiomics. Each layer helped answer a question the other did not together characterizing the dynamics of response or resistance.

The first study, the result of a research collaboration with Bruker Spatial Biology, applied Bruker’s CosMx same-cell RNA and protein profiling at subcellular resolution. Measuring immune-to-tumor distance cell by cell, Farcast determined that responding TMEs were distinguished by immune cells positioned inside the tumor compartment, not by immune cell counts. In a subset of non-responders, fibroblasts sat physically between immune cells and tumor cells, and neither drug regimen moved them. That barrier is invisible to flow cytometry, cytokine assays, or bulk sequencing. Combination therapy also selectively activated CD4 effector memory T cells in one stromal domain at the invasion front.

In the second study, the tumor with the lowest immune content in the cohort was shown to be the responder. Flow cytometry explained why: it carried a reservoir of progenitor-exhausted CD8 T cells (Tpex-to-Tex ratio 4.76 versus near zero in non-responders) alongside tertiary lymphoid structure-associated populations, including CD20+ follicular B cells and DC-LAMP+ mature dendritic cells. Nivolumab then drove NKT cell expansion and increased Granzyme B in NK cells. Exhaustion state and lymphoid organization outweighed raw infiltration.

“The tumor microenvironment is not a cell count. It is an arrangement,” said Satish Sankaran, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Farcast. “In our world every patient generates a matched, multi-layer, spatially registered dataset with a functional label, something that is not obtainable from cell lines, organoids, or xenografts. These data can truly reveal that the same immune cells can be effective or irrelevant depending on their position, exhaustion, and organization. TruTumor shows all of that on a patient's own tissue under real drug pressure. CosMx made a fibroblast barrier visible that no other readout could have shown.”

“Every layer of data we generate is anchored to a functional or spatial response on the same tissue,” said Mohit Malhotra, Co-founder and CEO. “That is what makes Farcast unique – to any data science team building AI models, or a translational group researching markers of response, such proprietary, multi layered data from same tissue perturbations can be a real difference maker.”

The company also plans to present new data at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Annual Meeting in November 2026.

About Farcast Biodynamics

Farcast Biodynamics (Farcast Biosciences LLC) has led translational and tumor microenvironment research since its inception at MIT in 2012. The company has evaluated more than 25,000 human tumor tissues across multiple immunotherapy mechanisms through a network of 20+ cancer centers, and is ISO 9001 certified. Its mission is to make precision cancer medicine work better for patients. Farcast operates from Pensacola, Florida and Bengaluru, India. www.farcastbio.com

AACR 2026 presentations

Poster #4747: Integrating tumor explant biosignatures and same-cell spatial multiomics to predict patient response to immune checkpoint blockade in head and neck cancer. Farcast Biodynamics and Bruker Spatial Biology.

Poster #5737: Tertiary Lymphoid Structure (TLS) representative cells elicit response to anti-PD-1 therapy in a cold tumor. Farcast Biosciences India with DBR & SK Super Speciality Hospital, Vydehi Institute of Medical Sciences, and Sri Lakshmi Multi Speciality Hospital.