10.16.20-Oncology-Round-table

Conference Video|Duration: 76:35
October 16, 2020
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    Functional precision medicine aims to match each cancer patient to the most effective treatment by performing ex vivo drug susceptibility testing on the patient’s tumor cells. However, despite promising feasibility studies, translation to the clinic has been limited by a lack of technologies and studies that directly assess whether ex vivo drug susceptibility testing is correlated with patient treatment outcome.

    In this talk, we will highlight an ongoing collaboration between MIT and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute where we developed a simple and high-throughput assay based on measuring subtle changes in single-cell mass distributions between drug-treated and untreated cancer cells. To demonstrate its potential, we will show results from a retrospective cohort of 70 glioblastoma patient-derived neurosphere models with matched patient outcomes.  Our findings suggest that cell mass measurements could be a “universal biomarker” to complement existing genomic and metabolic biomarkers to measure sensitivity or resistance to oncology drugs with a wide variety of cytostatic or cytotoxic mechanisms. To conclude, we will describe Travera’s progress towards further validating the predictive power of the single-cell mass assay and for establishing it as a CLIA-approved test for oncologists.
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  • Video details
    Functional precision medicine aims to match each cancer patient to the most effective treatment by performing ex vivo drug susceptibility testing on the patient’s tumor cells. However, despite promising feasibility studies, translation to the clinic has been limited by a lack of technologies and studies that directly assess whether ex vivo drug susceptibility testing is correlated with patient treatment outcome.

    In this talk, we will highlight an ongoing collaboration between MIT and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute where we developed a simple and high-throughput assay based on measuring subtle changes in single-cell mass distributions between drug-treated and untreated cancer cells. To demonstrate its potential, we will show results from a retrospective cohort of 70 glioblastoma patient-derived neurosphere models with matched patient outcomes.  Our findings suggest that cell mass measurements could be a “universal biomarker” to complement existing genomic and metabolic biomarkers to measure sensitivity or resistance to oncology drugs with a wide variety of cytostatic or cytotoxic mechanisms. To conclude, we will describe Travera’s progress towards further validating the predictive power of the single-cell mass assay and for establishing it as a CLIA-approved test for oncologists.
Locked Interactive transcript