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

Descripción del proyecto

Réplicas de tumores específicos de pacientes para ensayos farmacéuticos

A pesar de la inversión mundial en el desarrollo de fármacos oncológicos, solo un pequeño porcentaje de ellos llega al mercado. Esto se ve agravado por la heterogeneidad del cáncer, las distintas fases clínicas y el estado mutacional, que conducen a una toxicidad colateral y a la farmacorresistencia. El equipo del proyecto 3DTUMOUR, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, pretende mejorar la tasa de éxito en el desarrollo de fármacos y generar una herramienta de medicina personalizada para los profesionales sanitarios. Mediante una tecnología propia de bioimpresión tridimensional, en el proyecto se crearán réplicas de tumores específicos de pacientes para ensayos farmacéuticos. Este método ofrecerá la posibilidad de probar la eficacia de los fármacos «ex vivo» para cada paciente, lo que acelerará los tratamientos eficaces y reducirá la toxicidad y la resistencia.

Objetivo

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.

Despite a global investment in oncological drug development reaching 5 bn 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 M deaths by 2050- technologies that enable pharmaceutical companies to increase the efficiency of drug development may alleviate the threat imposed to the more than 50 M people currently living with cancer.

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 patient specific and represent simultaneously the specificity of the target tissue and 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 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.

3DTUMOUR aims at increasing the drug development success rate by transferring to industry this pharmaceutical testing platform. The successful outcome of this 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.