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

癌症目前是美国第二大死亡原因。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，这主要是由于可用于患者化疗治疗的新抗癌药物数量很少。这个问题背后的一个主要原因是在药物发现过程中候选药物的高失败率。在此过程中，制药行业使用癌细胞的二维（2D）培养物来评估候选药物化合物的功效和毒性。然而，作为2D层生长的癌细胞很难代表由癌细胞的三维（3D）块组成的人类肿瘤。这种差异导致细胞的生物学特性及其对药物的反应存在重大差异。因此，对癌细胞的2D培养有效的相同药物在患者中未能显示出疗效。为了克服这个长期存在的主要问题，这个创新军团（I-Corps）团队开发了一种新技术，可以在3D中培养癌细胞，并产生称为肿瘤球体的肿瘤样组织。在药物发现过程中引入该技术将有助于预测候选药物化合物的功效，并且仅向前推进那些对肿瘤球状体产生期望效果的化合物。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。以较低的成本获得大量有效的药物将改善患者的化疗并降低医疗成本。考虑到制药行业目前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满足的需求，提出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，可以针对实际肿瘤筛选化合物库，模型，并加快发现新的，有效的肿瘤药物。考虑到肿瘤药物发现的市场规模，这项技术可以在合同的基础上使用，为制药客户提供化合物库的筛选。或者，该技术可以授权给这些客户，以促进他们的内部药物筛选。

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.