A personalised medicine drug sensitivity and resistance testing platform and utilisation of acoustic droplet ejection at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland

Abstract

Summary The High Throughput Biomedicine (HTB) unit at FIMM Technology Centre provides a wide range of biomedical high throughput assays. In collaboration with research groups and the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa, we have set up drug sensitivity and resistance testing (DSRT) platform with a set of 450 approved and investigational oncology drugs on patient samples. Ex vivo drug testing is currently performed at FIMM with primary cancer cells from patients with leukaemia and multiple myeloma as well as cancer cell lines and the drug sensitivity responses are integrated with molecular profiling such as exome sequencing, transcriptomics and phosphoproteomics. Currently, DSRT is run in 384-well plate format in 5 concentrations for each drug or in 1536-well plate format with 9 concentrations per drug and the assay plates are pre-drugged using acoustic droplet ejection with Labcyte Echo550. The viability and cell death of cells is measured after 72 h and results are analysed using Dotmatics Studies – software and an in-house developed interface, Breeze. Application of the platform to AML patient samples has uncovered taxonomic drug-response subtypes and individualised therapy based on DSRT has resulted in several clinical responses. The DSRT platform enables drug repositioning, provides new combinatorial possibilities and allows for linking drug sensitivities to predictive biomarkers. We are developing the platform with additional readouts and increasing the number of drugs. Our Labcyte Access Workstation, with Echo550 and Echo525 integration, allows development and set-up of miniaturised follow-up assays, such as reverse-phase protein array and qPCR, using non-contact acoustic dispensing.