MOS-Select: MicroOrganoSpheres® as 3D in vitro patient avatars for personalized cancer therapy selection

Cancer is the main cause of death in the Netherlands, with over 130.000 patients who succumb to the consequences of the disease every year. And while overall outcome of patients after primary diagnosis is gradually improving, outcome for metastatic disease remains often dismal. As short-term societal impact, the project is geared to improve drug selection for individual cancer patients, facilitating personalized therapy selection. Such optimized cancer treatment can prolong efficacy of effective drugs, and reduce

rehospitalization of the patient, improving short-term outcome and the patient’s quality-of-life. As long-term societal outcome, the project can also improve the selection of the most-suitable drug of patients still in the adjuvant disease setting, improving cure rates of patients diagnosed with cancer.

Cancer treatment has profound economic impact, with costs of oncological care rising every year. Importantly, ineffective treatment has both societal impact -as adjuvant therapy failure gives rise to incurable, lethal metastatic disease- but also a profound economic impact, as therapy switching inevitably increases costs of care. This project will develop novel models to facilitate drug discovery and enable personalized therapeutics, reducing the use of ineffective therapeutics, and limiting the use of expensive therapeutic agents to those patients who would be most-likely to benefit.

The cancer research community currently lacks reliable close-to-patient model systems to study the interaction between tumor cells and their microenvironment. Furthermore, such complex model systems have the potential to limit the need of animal models for specific research questions, and allow for more reliable clinical translation of research findings, taking inter-patient heterogeneity into consideration and allowing for complex genotype/phenotype associations in translational cancer research.