I-Corps: Robotic 3D Tumor Technology for High Throughput Drug Screening

University Of Akron, Akron OH

Investigators

Abstract

Cancer is currently the second leading cause of death in the United States. Despite significant investments to develop new therapeutics, cancer treatment has only marginally improved primarily due to the small number of new anti-cancer drugs made available for chemotherapy treatment of patients. A major reason behind this problem is the high rate of failure of candidate drugs in the process of drug discovery. During this process, pharmaceutical industries use two-dimensional (2D) cultures of cancer cells to evaluate efficacy and toxicity of candidate drug compounds. However, cancer cells grown as a 2D layer poorly represent human tumors that comprise of three dimensional (3D) mass of cancer cells. This disparity causes major differences in biological properties of cells and their responses to drugs. As a result, the same drug that is effective against 2D culture of cancer cells fails to show efficacy in patients. To overcome this major and long-standing problem, this Innovation Corps (I-Corps)team has developed a new technology that will allow culture of cancer cells in 3D and produce tumor-like tissues known as tumor spheroids. Incorporation of this technology in the process of drug discovery will help predict efficacy of candidate drug compounds and only move forward those compounds that produce a desired effect against tumor spheroids. This will substantially reduce ineffective compounds from further consideration, expedite introducing new drugs to market, and significantly reduce associated costs. Availability of a larger number of effective drugs at a lower cost will improve chemotherapy of patients and reduce healthcare costs. Considering the current unmet need of pharmaceutical industries for a robotic, high throughput 3D cancer cell culture technology for use in the process of drug discovery, the proposed tumor spheroid technology fills this major gap by offering an enabling tool to screen libraries of chemical compounds against realistic tumor models and expedite the discovery of novel, effective oncology drugs. Considering the market size for oncology drug discovery, this technology can be used on a contractual basis to offer screening of libraries of compounds for pharmaceutical customers. Alternatively, the technology can be licensed to such customers to facilitate their in-house drug screening.