STTR Phase I: Assessing an innovative Microfluidic Tissue Array device for applications in drug development and precision medicine

该项目的广泛/商业影响旨在开发一种微流控设备并将其商业化，作为一个临床平台，以快速确定针对个别癌症患者的精确和有效的治疗方法。目前，精确医学中的预测只取得了有限的成功，美国临床肿瘤学会(ASCO)不建议仅使用任何特定的药物敏感性测试方法来指导临床治疗决策。因此，临床上迫切需要建立一种可快速实现且具有临床相关性的实验系统，该系统能够快速且经济地测试治疗方案对单个患者活检的影响。本项目开发的微流控平台旨在利用患者个体活检快速准确地评估药物疗效，从而指导个性化癌症治疗，从而提高存活率，降低医疗成本，改善患者的生活质量。此外，这项技术将在成本和时间方面促进癌症药物的发现和开发，从而降低药物开发的成本。这个小型企业技术转移(STTR)第一阶段项目将开发一种微流控系统，该系统可以保留组织活检样本的活性、结构和其他生物学特性，为有效的药物筛选和确定单个癌症患者样本对治疗药物的反应性提供平台。目前用于癌症治疗的精确医学主要是基于癌症基因组数据的预测，而不是直接测试或验证患者癌症样本对药物的反应性。缺乏快速、准确的直接检测方法是癌症治疗的主要障碍。为了克服这一障碍，微流控组织阵列(µFTA)将被开发来模拟生理血液灌流，以维持肿瘤样本的自然微环境。因此，在µFTA中培养的肿瘤组织可以保留其体内生物学特性。该项目将确定在µFTA中建立一种可靠的检测方法来测量肿瘤组织对药物的反应的可行性，并评估所获得的数据与体内结果的初步相关性。该项目的最终目标是开发一个基于µFTA的平台，直接评估患者活检组织对不同疗法的反应，从而为个别患者提供药物选择指导。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader/commercial impact of this project aims to develop and commercialize a microfluidic device as a clinical platform to rapidly identify precise and effective therapies for individual cancer patients. Currently, prediction in precision medicine only has limited success, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) does not recommend using any specific drug sensitivity testing method alone to guide clinical treatment decision-making. Therefore, there is an urgent and unmet clinical need to create a rapidly implementable and clinically relevant experimental system that can rapidly and economically test the effects of therapeutic options on an individual patient's biopsy. The microfluidic platform developed in this project aims to rapidly and accurately evaluate drug efficacy using individual patient's biopsies, thus guiding personalized cancer treatment and leading to increased survival rates, reduced cost of healthcare, and improved quality of patient life. In addition, this technology will facilitate cancer drug discovery and development in terms of cost and time, leading to reduced costs of drug development. This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will develop a microfluidic system that preserves viability, structure, and other biological properties of tissue biopsy samples, providing a platform for efficient drug screening and determining the responsiveness of individual patient cancer samples to therapeutic drugs. Current precision medicine for cancer treatment is mainly prediction-based on cancer genomic data instead of direct test or validation of the responsiveness of patient cancer samples to drugs. Lack of rapid and accurate methods for such direct tests is a major obstacle in cancer treatment. To overcome this obstacle, Microfluidic Tissue Arrays (µFTA) will be developed to mimic physiological blood perfusion to maintain the native microenvironment of tumor samples. As a result, tumor tissues cultured in the µFTAs can preserve their in vivo biological properties. This project will establish the feasibility of setting up a robust assay in the µFTA for measuring tumor tissue response to drugs and assess initial correlation of the obtained data with in vivo results. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a µFTA-based platform to directly evaluate the responsiveness of patient biopsy tissues to different therapies, thus providing drug selection guidance for individual patients.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.