A new tool to screen dynamic drug activities against cancer

DynOScreen: Developing an organoid dynamic screening platform to evaluate immuno-oncology drug activities in a clinically relevant preclinical model

Harvesting the patient’s own immune system to kill tumor cells has shown incredible potential to treat cancer. This has fuelled the development of many cancer immunotherapies. To narrow these drug development efforts, costs and timelines towards the most promising treatments for a large group of patients, patient-representative model systems and tailored technologies are needed. Patient-derived organoids (PDOs) are in vitro culture models that functionally resemble the tissue from which they originated and have shown predictive value for treatment outcomes in patients. In this partnership, HUB Organoids, specialized in PDO platforms for drug testing will team up with 3D imaging and AI-driven computational specialists to develop a new screening tool to record immune cell activites to support better decision-making in immunotherpy development.

A staggering low clincal trial success rate (3.4% for oncology drugs) underscores the need for better models and readouts in the preclinal drug development phase. Dynamic Organoid Screen (DynOScreen) addresses this caveat by developing a dynamic 3D imaging screening platform tailored to PDOs capable of recording immune cell activities. Since immunotherapy effectively present ‘living drugs’, depending on live cell behavior to achieve treatment outcomes, recording these cellular dynamics with DynOScreen offers an important advantage for enhancing our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of drug response.

DynOScreen aims to improve drug development outcomes significantly, by streamlining drug development processes towards only the most promising drugs based on active tumor-targeting behavior. By using immune cells and PDOs generated from patients with known clinical drug responses, DynOScreen results will be compared to the treatment outcomes of patients in the clinic. Altogether, this study aims to deliver and validate an innovative screening platform to facilitate better decision-making in drug development, ultimately improving patient treatment outcomes.

Summary

Harvesting the patient’s own immune system to kill tumors has shown incredible potential to treat cancer, fuelling the development of many cancer immunotherapies. DynOScreen aims to develop a dynamic 3D imaging organoid screening platform to streamline drug development towards only the most promising treatments based on active immune cell behavior.

Technology Readiness Level (TRL)

4 - 5

Time period

36 months

Partners