Unlocking the Dark Genome of Cancer: A Landmark Collaboration Between UNC Charlotte and BioCytics

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C., July 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- BioCytics, Inc., in partnership with Carolina BioOncology Institute, PLLC, and UNC Charlotte are proud to announce the launch of an exciting research initiative aimed at identifying relevant genomic features that contribute to cancer cell growth and response to treatment. This collaborative project, titled "Unlocking the Dark Genome of Cancer via Integrated Multi-Omics Platform of Discovery," will harness advanced sequencing technologies and computational pipelines to investigate the hidden viral and immune drivers of cancer progression and treatment response.

Led by principal investigator Richard Allen White III, Ph.D., Associate professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics at UNC Charlotte, and Renaud Warin, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of BioCytics, the two-year project integrates clinical oncology samples with state-of-the-art long-read sequencing, immune repertoire profiling, and viral dark-genome discovery. The research team will deploy clinical-grade Rust-based computational algorithms and pipelines to unify multi-omics data processing and reporting, ultimately enabling translational decision-making in real-world clinical environments.

More specifically, the aims of this project include characterizing patient-specific immune repertoires, mapping the viral "dark genome" in tumors, and deploying a modular, containerized computational suite for automated quality control, variant calling, methylation analysis, and pathway reporting with a goal of generating a clinical decision support tool that enables clinicians to compute a score to indicate the likelihood of benefit from a particular therapy.

"Our project will resolve new insights into the roles of the dark genome within cancer while providing clinical-grade modernizations of computational pipelines to elucidate such findings," said White, of UNC Charlotte. Expanding on the role of the programming language Rust, White added, "Rust is the future of bioinformatics due to many of its features, including memory safety, scalability, and excellent performance. The 'Rustification' of code related to biology is active and alive and currently providing major boosts to bio-analytics across the board."

According to Warin, "the dark viral genome has been largely ignored in the field of cancer, despite its potential to generate antigens in the dysregulated cancer cell." Warin goes on to say, "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." Warin also noted that local collaboration played a key role in the project: "The proximity of a field expert such as Dr. White at UNC Charlotte was too good of a collaborative opportunity to pass."

The two laboratories look forward to working together with the goal of creating comprehensive immune repertoire atlases and viral element maps.

About BioCytics: BioCytics, Inc., founded by Dr. John Powderly in 2005, is a privately held health technology company co-located in Huntersville, North Carolina with Carolina BioOncology Institute, a cancer treatment and clinical trial facility. BioCytics is using Autologous Adaptive Immune Cell Therapy (AAICT) to develop an immuno-oncology platform for treating solid tumors with the patient's own immune cells. AAICT is a revolutionary point-of-care cell manufacturing process designed to generate nongenetically modified effector cell fractions for all stages of all solid tumors.

About the University of North Carolina at Charlotte:
More than 32,000 students choose to call North Carolina's urban research university home. As Charlotte's only R1 institution, UNC Charlotte drives innovation and discovery in one of the fastest-growing regions in the United States. The University has an award-winning focus on student success, internationally recognized research and creative activity, and a deep commitment to community engagement and cultural vibrancy that makes it one of U.S. News & World Report's Top 100 Public Universities. The Difference is Charlotte.

SOURCE BioCytics Inc.