Project description
Tumour chip technology to mimic how cancer cells react to drugs
Selecting the most effective therapy for each cancer patient is the Holy Grail in cancer treatment. The low efficacy of many cancer treatments mostly arises from the limited ability to predict the patient tumour response to therapeutic agents. The EU-funded BITFORM project is developing an engineered system that should allow accurate tumour response prediction to anti-cancer drugs and further improve patients’ outcome. This will be a breast cancer ecosystem-on-a-chip bioreactor that will conserve the cancer tissue characteristics with high reliability. Breast cancer cell secreted biomarkers will be monitored in real time by a connected biosensing module. The new platform is expected to lead to a new methodology for effectively testing anti-cancer therapies on a chip.
Objective
In this project I will develop an integrated multi-module platform in which a breast cancer ecosystem-on-a-chip (BCE-on-a-chip) bioreactor module, connected to an optical biosensing module based on multiplexed Resonant Nanopillars (R-NPs) transducers, will be developed for biomarkers and anti-breast cancer drug real-time monitoring.
Currently attrition rates in clinical trials for new anti-cancer drugs and personalized treatments are higher than all other therapeutic areas. Mainly due to the great reliability on conventional 2D and 3D scaffolds in-vitro culture methodologies in preclinical studies. Those cell-based models are limited by their
inability to conserve the patient tumor features and do not accurately show drug response, observed later in clinical trials.
Due to the increasing number of cancer diagnoses, an engineered system that allows an accurate prediction of patient tumor response to anti-cancer drug, is urgently needed.
In Bitform Project I will develop a BCE-on-a-chip bioreactor that intends to conserve the cancer tissue characteristics with high reliability. Breast cancer cell secreted biomarkers will be monitored in real-time with a multiplexed biosensing module based on R-NPs. In order to assess the capability of Bitform platform, an anti-cancer drug demonstrator (Paclitaxel) will be tested. By delivering Paclitaxel to the BCE-on-a-chip, monitoring of different cell secreted target biomarkers will permit to evaluate the effect of this drug, and thus to demonstrate the performance of the platform.
The Bitform platform will be suitable for different organ-on-chip culture models and biomolecules monitoring secreted by the cells. This will lead to a new methodology for testing anti-cancer therapies on-a-chip. This is a relevant milestone to study the further potential of the Bitform Platform in personalized medicine, which can have a transformative impact not only on the outcome but also on the costs of treatments by avoiding expensive failures.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyenvironmental biotechnologybioremediationbioreactors
- engineering and technologyenvironmental biotechnologybiosensing
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncologybreast cancer
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespersonalized medicine
- engineering and technologyother engineering and technologiesmicrotechnologyorgan on a chip
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
28040 Madrid
Spain