A breakthrough in Renal Cell Carcinoma: Personalized RCC-Test

Project Information

RCC-TEST

Grant agreement ID: 710938

DOI

10.3030/710938

Project closed

EC signature date 25 November 2015

Start date 1 February 2016

End date 31 July 2016

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Health, demographic change and well-being

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

ICELLTIS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RCC-TEST (A breakthrough in Renal Cell Carcinoma: Personalized RCC-Test)

Reporting period: 2016-02-01 to 2016-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The problem addressed was how to predict which patient will respond to therapy, knowing that a cancer is a personal disease. The Renal cell Carcinoma (RCC) is the most common kidney cancer for which the RCC-TEST diagnostic tool is a solution to investigate the response of tumor cells to medical drugs in vitro. ICELLTIS has optimized the RCC-TEST with 3D spheroid tumor cell culture model for fast, and accurate therapeutic protocol selection for RCC. New protocols with combined immuno-and targeted therapies have shown highly promising results but have to be evaluated for each patient to apply the best protocol.

The RCC represents the 7th most common cancer in men, and the 9th in women. It is often asymptomatic and the majority of patients are diagnosed at late disease stages with about 25-30% of them already with metastatic disease.The RCC-TEST will enable rapid and cost-effective personalization of anti-cancer treatments, leading to improve overall patient survival and decrease healthcare expenses.

The objective is to provide oncologists with a new in vitro diagnostic test to use immediatly after surgical intervention, as complementary Tools for establishing, the real personalized protocol. It will be used in parallel with standard compulsory anatomo-pathological analysis. For the first time, the spheroids will be composed of own patients' tumor and immune cells. The possibility to co-culture both types of cells is determinant to investigate the response to medical drugs in vitro.
The specific objective was to optimize and scale-up the RCC-TEST to be ready for further multicentric european clinical trial.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work performed was :
-the optimization of spheroids
-the comparison between cells in the tumor and in spheroids from the same patient
-the effect of different drugs, including immunotherapy, on cell viability
-the scale up of the test on several patients having an RCC, with comparative results to do correlations. Results obtained after different therapeutical protocole on spheroids, proposed by oncologist and those chosen to be apply to the patient were compared and exhibit a positive correlation

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

In comparison with existing solutions, ICELLTIS will be the first to propose mRCC spheroids co-culture models including tumoral and immune cells, from the same patient, and the first to offer to oncologists an answer regarding the best choice of treatment to apply to one patient. The innovation is in the use of patient’s own immune cells for testing drugs targeting specific immune cells: like antibodies in immunotherapy.
The innovation is also in the proprietary proliferation medium specific of this tumor cell type using part of patient’s serum and other components (i.e specific bio-inert hydrogel) coming from Icelltis experience. It allows extremely high reproducibility of tumor cells preparation, and guaranties stability of the cell phenotypes so the high quality of the model and consequently the increased liability of the test.
ICELLTIS 3D spheroid RCC culture advantages in regards of other existing 3D cultures are:
• The unique possibility to have numerous identical spheroids allowing several drug tests.
• The unique use of co-culture with immune cells in the spheroids. It allows the possibility to test drugs targeting specifically for this cell population, knowing that these drugs are currently the most efficient but also the most expensive.
• The preservation of tumor cell and immune cell phenotypes during proliferation phase allowing a correct model compared to native cells from biopsy,
• The customized solutions according to the real distribution of each cell types present in the biopsy. There isn’t any competitor able to provide such customized solutions.

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