54 BIOTECHNOLOGY
trial participants, a greater likelihood of response in the clinic and a reduced oncology drug discovery attrition rate. However, running a battery of tests for drug screening and validation in vivo on PDX models is a costly and time-consuming proposition. Perhaps the greatest drawback to this technique is the fact that tumours grow at the same rate in mice as they do in humans, and implantation, propagation and drug screening in mouse avatars is a time-consuming process. With the technology developed for Cell2Sphere, StemTek can provide ready-to-use PDX derived 3D spheroids in vitro to reduce these times and costs, allowing for testing a panel of tumour indications in just one experiment. Growing patient tumours in mouse avatars allows the amplification of precious and necessarily limited patient sample material, creating a convenient replicable model to generate patient samples on demand. Tink of this as a clinical trial in vitro. With this information, pharma companies
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can then validate the effect of their compounds specifically in the in vivo PDX model that is more likely to respond to this particular compound, allowing a significant time and cost reduction in drug development before entering in clinical trials and increasing the probability of compound efficacy, thus reducing the attrition rate.
Personalised drug evaluation Personalised medicine is a concept based on treating an individual according to their tumour characterisation. It is defined by the US National Cancer Institute as “a form of medicine that uses information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose and treat disease.” Targeted therapies are an excellent example of this type of medicine – developed based on specific factors within a person’s tumour, such as a mutated protein or an overexpressed gene. Personalided medicine can only go on to fully become a reality with improvements in
efficiency and decreases in costs in oncology R&D development. With Cell2Sphere technology, StemTek aims to provide 3D spheroid avatars directly from each patient, allowing treatment of the patient’s tumour outside of their body, with response rates to different agents supplied back to clinicians to guide patient treatment. Te future is here today: treating oncology patients on an individual patient-by- patient basis.
Above: StemTek can provide ready-to-use PDX derived 3D spheroids in vitro
Below: This technology is leading the way for personalised medicine
Angel Garcia Martin is CEO of StemTek Therapeutics.
www.stemtektherapeutics.com
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