Development of a high-throughput microplate based device to analyse the patient derived tumour microenvironment

Introduction

Cancer and tumours are exceptionally heterogeneous in tissue and cellular composition, clinical stage, and mutational status. Additionally, the presence of multiple cancers or metastatic tumours in patients leads to complicated drug regimens resulting in high off-target toxicity, unexpected drug resistance, and difficulties in understanding the therapeutic effects.

Current Challenges

Despite a global investment in oncological drug development reaching 5 billion USD, less than 5% of all oncological drugs in the pipeline enter the therapy toolbox. Given the huge burden that cancer poses at all levels in society—leading cause of mortality worldwide, expected to reach 20 million deaths by 2050—technologies that enable pharmaceutical companies to increase the efficiency of drug development may alleviate the threat imposed on the more than 50 million people currently living with cancer.

Technological Solutions

Such technologies include pre-clinical models that represent the tumour microenvironment and reveal the effect of drug candidates in laboratory tumour replicas. To provide clinically relevant information, such models must be:

1. Patient-specific
2. Representative of the specificity of the target tissue
3. Reflective of the cell heterogeneity of the tumour microenvironment

In addition, to be industrially relevant, they must be implementable, reproducible, and high throughput. Commercially available solutions do not meet these requirements.

3DTUMOUR Technology

3DTUMOUR provides a proprietary technology to produce multiple 3D bioprinted replicas of patient-derived tumour models that faithfully represent the therapeutic target for a drug candidate.

Project Goals

3DTUMOUR aims at increasing the drug development success rate by transferring this pharmaceutical testing platform to industry. The successful outcome of this proof of concept (PoC) will provide clinicians with a tool to test the efficacy of drugs ex vivo, accelerating the onset of efficient treatments and reducing off-target toxicity and unexpected drug resistance by applying a personalized medicine approach.