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

癌症目前是美国第二大死因。尽管在开发新疗法方面进行了大量投资，但癌症治疗仅略有改善，这主要是由于用于患者化疗的抗癌新药数量很少。这一问题背后的一个主要原因是候选药物在药物发现过程中的高失败率。在这一过程中，制药行业使用癌细胞的二维(2D)培养来评估候选药物化合物的疗效和毒性。然而，作为2D层生长的癌细胞不能很好地代表由三维(3D)癌细胞组成的人类肿瘤。这种差异导致了细胞的生物学特性及其对药物的反应的重大差异。结果，同样对2D培养癌细胞有效的药物在患者身上没有显示出效果。为了克服这一重大而长期存在的问题，这个创新团队(i-Corps)开发了一项新技术，可以在3D模式下培养癌细胞，并产生被称为肿瘤球体的类似肿瘤的组织。将这项技术引入药物发现过程中，将有助于预测候选药物化合物的疗效，并只推进那些对肿瘤球体产生预期效果的化合物。这将大大减少对无效化合物的进一步考虑，加快将新药推向市场，并显著降低相关成本。以更低的成本获得更多有效的药物将改善患者的化疗并降低医疗成本。考虑到目前制药行业对用于药物发现过程的机器人、高通量3D癌细胞培养技术的未得到满足的需求，拟议的肿瘤球体技术填补了这一主要空白，它提供了一种使能工具来根据现实的肿瘤模型筛选化合物库，并加速发现新的、有效的肿瘤药物。考虑到肿瘤学药物发现的市场规模，这项技术可以在合同的基础上用于为制药客户提供化合物库的筛选。或者，可以将该技术授权给这些客户，以方便他们进行内部药物筛选。

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.