Novel RTA technology for functional precision medicine
Advantages
- Patient samples can be analysed in less than 24 hours under ex vivo conditions.
- It’s superior to other methodologies such as cytotoxic assays, organoids and patient-derived xenografts (PDXs), because the assay is directly performed in living patient-isolated cells, obtaining clinically relevant results.
- RTA keeps the cells alive and it is compatible with other analyses.
- Its integration in a microfluidic assay minimizes the number of cells needed, increasing the number of therapies that can be tested with samples obtained using non-invasive methods.
Goal
The group is looking for partners and investors, but other collaborations may be considered.
Patent
International Publication Number: WO2024/013236
Priority date: 12 July 2022
Applicants: Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), Institució Catalana de Recerca I Estudis Avançats (ICREA) and Universitat de Barcelona
Reference
UBTT0461-E
Contact
Inma Íñiguez – Fundació Bosch i Gimpera – Universitat de Barcelona
Email: iiniguez@fbg.ub.edu
Eduardo Salas – IBEC
Email: esalas@ibecbarcelona.eu
Novel RTA technology for functional precision medicine
Executive summary
J Montero, A Manzano et al., with wide experience on development of new tools and therapies for personalized cancer treatment, have generated a new technology that enables testing multiple anticancer treatments for precision medicine in less than 24 hours. Furthermore, they are developing a new benchtop instrument to perform these analyses in situ in an inexpensive and accessible manner.
The group is looking for partners and investors, but other collaborations may be considered.
Introduction
Cancer patients are treated following therapeutic regimens based on pathologic and molecular information (mostly genomic). However, tumors rapidly adapt leading to resistance and relapse and certain patients do not benefit from therapies selected based on this strategy. Alternatively, functional assays directly expose patient’s tumor cells to potential therapeutic agents to determine which will be the best treatment for each patient.
Description
The technology consists of a novel functional assay that rapidly measures drug-induced apoptotic induction and enables testing multiple anticancer treatments directly on alive patient-isolated cancer cells in less than 24 hours for precision medicine.
The RTA assay uses an apoptotic catalyser to accelerate this cell death process by days. By comparing RTA profiles of non-treated and shortly incubated cells with anticancer drugs, it can predict days in advance if a given agent will sensitize cells towards apoptosis, which indicates future treatment cytotoxicity and clinical efficacy. Moreover, RTA keeps the cells alive and it is compatible with other analyses (omics).
The Real-time Tracking of Apoptosis (RTA) assay, together with a microfluidic device and a LED-based readout method will enable the implementation of precision medicine to identify the best treatment for each patient.
Current stage of development
The team has already generated preliminary results using different tumor models and primary samples treated with multiple anticancer treatments. Three RTA versions are now developed using flow cytometry, high-throughput microscopy and microfluidics, depending on specific sample requirements and agents tested.