Problem/ issue that was addressed through TheranOMICS Project:
TheranOMICS focuses on improving Bladder Cancer (BC) management. BC is the second most frequent cause of mortality among genitourinary cancers and the costliest malignancy of all to manage. It is classified into non-muscle invasive BC (NMIBC, which is less advanced) and muscle invasive BC (MIBC, more advanced). Invasiveness results in poor prognosis, since more than 50% of patients succumb to their disease within 5 years. Unfortunately, patients with less advanced cancer frequently re-develop cancer and in some cases in advanced forms. Moreover, treatment options are limited for the advanced cancer, resulting in very high mortality. TheranOMICS’ idea was the development of tools that could timely and accurately predict the disease progression. This will support the management of the patients by guiding intervention and on the other hand, will assist the drug development to support the release of novel drugs. The latter is directed towards pharmaceutical industry and is equally important, as currently the efficiency of oncological drugs is low. This problem is attributed to the disease heterogeneity that results in low response rates to the developed drugs. As conventional pathological classification seems not sufficient, the way forward is to integrate available molecular data (-omics features) to define disease classes at the molecular level. From the Innovation and Industrial point of view, by offering companion tools to pharmaceutical industry for stratification of patients into those that are more likely to present with an advanced cancer form and/or those responding to specific treatment, several benefits are offered including the decrease in the overall development cost for development of BC drugs. After the completion of the TheranOMICS project, we can conclude that the recruitment of the Innovation Associate was crucial for the implementation of the above predictive tools.The collaboration resulted in the successful integration of the available -omics data, that Mosaiques diagnostics (Host institution) had acquired and the transformation into clinically meaningful and industrially marketable tools. This was only possible based on the unique background of the Innovation Associate that combined expertise in bioinformatics, data analytics and statistics.
Importance for Society:
TheranOMICS targets to support the running clinical trials and also propose clinical trials that are initiated at an earlier timepoint. The ultimate goal is the improvement of the management of BC patients. Aiming at earlier intervention, there are substantial benefits for patients, such as better survival rate, but also better quality of life for the patients. The need for guidance in treatment is reflected by the fact that the current therapies for BC are not fully efficient and are accompanied by serious side effects. In fact, for less advanced BC, treatment with Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) is recommended. Unfortunately, there are several side effects and approximately 40% of the patients do not respond. Therefore, as cancer progresses, radical cystectomy is performed along with chemotherapy in cases combined with recently introduced immunotherapy. However, survival in the advanced cases is decreasing dramatically. Collectively, there is a need to improve on the therapies, but also to guide intervention individually to patients that have high probability to respond and thus benefit from the therapy compared to those that do not respond, while for the latter avoiding overtreatment and the associated side effects.
TheranOMICS overall objectives were:
1. The recruitment of a highly skilled Associate to establish multi-parametric, robust molecular profiles which can predict disease outcome and treatment response.
2. The integration of -omics data via bioinformatics tools to reveal molecular features associated with disease outcome.
3. The development of tools for stratifying BC patients and pre-select them according to the predicted drug response.
