Abstract 3116: Bioluminescent 3D tumors with immune cell co-culture for high throughput screening (HTS)

Abstract

Abstract In the past decade, cancer immunotherapy has revolutionized the cancer treatment strategy. Immune-oncology (IO) drugs play an important role in treating various malignancies. Immunotherapies work by re-educating and boosting patients’ immune systems to recognize and eliminate cancer cells. The immune co-culture assay provides invaluable information to understand the tumor microenvironment (TME) and observe the immune response after IO drug treatment. Recent advancements in the Champions TumorGraft3D (CTG3D) platform provides more consistent and accurate information for preclinical drug evaluation, but also efficiently simulate the tumor-Immune microenvironment (TIME) and interactions between cancer organoids and immunocyte. However, current analytic approaches in organoid-immune co-culture studies are still highly reliant on flow cytometry and high-resolution confocal imaging endpoints to provide the study outcome. There is a need for a fast and cost-effective co-culture platform to help set up experimental conditions. Easily traceable tags (e.g. bioluminescent and fluorescent) can quickly help establish reliable the effector (E) cell to tumor (T) cell conditions, thus enabling the user to test multiple immune-cell activator or engagers concentrations in a cost-effective and rapid manner. At Champions Oncology we provide stable Luc/GFP-tagged CTG3D models. We have built a reliable CTG3D-immune co-culture platform with various indications (including colon, prostate, gastric, non-small cell lung cancer, and leukemia) which can be used in co-culture with autologous TIL, allogenic TIL and NK cells, thus providing users a fast and cost-effective option to optimize the E:T ratio and monitor the drug performance. Citation Format: Fu-Ju Chou, Samaneh Kamali, Mara Gilardi, Brandon Walling, Abhay Andar, Karin Abarca-Heidemann, Maria Mancini. Bioluminescent 3D tumors with immune cell co-culture for high throughput screening (HTS) [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 3116.