Abstract 3411: Proof of concept study of next generation drug screening platform for glioma patients

Abstract

Abstract Precision medicine endeavors to match patients to therapies mostly on the basis of the genomic alterations in their tumors. However, it has been shown that ‘genomics only’ approach is often insufficient for best drug selection. Functional precision medicine has been recently emerging as it provides directly translatable information on which drug to choose among available drugs. Traditionally, cancer drugs are tested in cancer cell line models, but cell lines cannot represent individual clinical patients and are too biologically pronounced to be useful for drug screening purposes. Our patient-derived cell (PDC) drug screening system overcomes these points and can generally also correlate with genome changes. AVATAMED and CBmed, together with AimedBio, are collaborating in a Precision Cancer Project, set out next generation drug screening platform to screen Austrian glioma patients for proof-of-concept study. Fresh native tissue from both low- and high-grade glioma are collected. Tumor tissue is used for PDC isolation using mechanical and enzymatic tissue dissociation. To preserve the original tumor similarity, tissue is short term cultured under two weeks, and PDCs are seeded and treated with a panel of clinical- and preclinical drugs followed by viability assessment. We have cultured 65 PDCs from both low- and high-grade glioma. Tissue culture success rate and drug screening success rate was >85% suggesting that specimen logistics and tissue processing are well-established and conducted. PDCs were treated with 79 drugs that are commonly used in clinical setting. In order to evaluate the quality of the results, the screening was conducted at two different sites, AimedBio and CBmed, and the data were compared. Overall, high accuracy and reproducibility were confirmed by low Coefficient of Variation (CV) between replicates and high Z-factor between negative and positive controls. In addition, data generated from both sites showed high correlations. Collectively, our next-generation drug screening platform shows the potential to give the best therapeutic options to glioma patients. To this end, we are moving forward use this platform in clinical study. Citation Format: Nam-Gu Her, Amin El-Heliebi, Gi Ju Lee, San Ha Park, Barbara Prietl, Stephanie S. Ahn, Hong Boon Toh, Thomas R. Pieber, Do-Hyun Nam. Proof of concept study of next generation drug screening platform for glioma patients [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 3411.