Living Tumor Biopsies to Interrogate Immune Function and Response to Therapy

 描述(由申请人提供)：治疗肿瘤内的免疫反应是新治疗发展的一个主要焦点。对于新兴疗法，有明显的应答者和无应答者，目前，我们无法知道免疫系统在多少方面存在缺陷。我们也无法知道当前或新兴的哪种疗法对特定患者有效。目前最好的方法是在(希望)找到有效的治疗方法之前，对每个患者进行一系列的治疗。在未来，我们相信我们将能够挖掘每个患者刚刚切除的活检中包含的丰富信息。每一次活组织检查包含的信息比我们目前收集的发生在其中的时空细胞相互作用的形式要多得多。当在适当的条件下收集、保存和成像活组织检查时，许多免疫活动继续发生。我们假设有可能通过制定‘活组织活检’的标准实践来研究人类肿瘤微环境‘活’的功能。如果我们是正确的，患者样本既可以是整体的特征，也可以作为单一或联合治疗的试验台，以确定最有可能引发肿瘤排斥的治疗方法。稀有、小型和信息丰富的人类生物标本将被直接和可重复地研究，并将在下一代发现和诊断平台中发挥关键作用。这项研究将确定一系列参数，通过这些参数，活检样本可以进入这一重要发现流。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Treating the immune response within tumors is a major focus of new therapeutic development. For emerging therapies, there are clear responders and non-responders and at present, we are blind to knowing in how many ways the immune system is deficient. We are also unable to know which of the current or emerging therapies will work for a given patient. The current best-approach is to put each patient through a sequence of therapies before (hopefully) hitting upon one that works. In the future, we believe we will be able to tap the wealth of information that is contained in the just-excised biopsy of each patient. Each biopsy contains significantly more information than we currently glean in the form of the spatiotemporal cellular interactions that are taking place therein. Many immune activities continue to occur when biopsies are collected, maintained and imaged under appropriate conditions. We hypothesize that it is possible to study the functionality of the human tumor microenvironment `live' by the development of standard practices for `live biopsy'. If we are right, patient samples can be both characterized overall but also used as a test-bed for single or combinations of therapies to determine the most likely one to induce tumor rejection. Rare, small and information-rich human biospecimens will be directly and reproducibly studied and will be critical in next-gen discovery and diagnostic platforms. This study will define a serie of parameters by which biopsy samples can enter this important discovery stream.