February 21, 2023

Ex Vivo Image-based Drug Screening for Precision Medicine and Drug Discovery in Glioblastoma

5th Call, Tech Trans

Short Summary

This PHRT project aims to develop and clinically validate a new technology called Pharmacoscopy to help clinicians identify the right treatment for patients suffering from brain cancers, as well as to discover new treatment options.

Goals

Over the past years, together with the group of Dr. Michael Weller at the USZ, the Snijder Lab has developed a new way to directly test the effects of hundreds of drugs on patient GBM tumor material, a technique we call Pharmacoscopy. We have started to collect the data to investigate if the drug responses we measure outside of the patient reflect the actual clinical response of the patient. This PHRT project aims at further validating Pharmacoscopy as a predictive ‘functional precision medicine’ platform, and for the discovery of new treatment options for GBM.

Significance

If successful, this project presents a concrete route to establish ETH-developed technology to guide personalized treatment of, and identify new treatments for Glioblastoma, one of the deadliest cancers.

Background

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and most aggressive primary brain tumor in adults. It is a deadly disease with an urgent need for more effective therapies. Part of the challenge of treating GBM is the blood-brain-barrier, wich prevents most drugs from reaching the tumor. Furthermore, a lack of clinically translatable model systems complicates drug discovery for this terrible disease.