A DIAGNOSTIC PLATFORM FOR ASSAY GUIDED PERSONALIZED CANCER THERAPY
In vitro diagnostic drug sensitivity assay
iVV assay™ is a new patented technology to determine the most effective cancer medicine for every patient. Every tumor is unique with a specific drug response pattern. It has been observed that patients within the same diagnostic group can react differently to the same cancer therapy.
One reason is the unique parameters of the tumor itself which constantly alters during the course of the disease, on the other hand different patients can have different biochemically active drug-pathways. All the above mentioned features are making todays cancer care very complex.
The QantaScope iVV assay™ has been developed at Karolinska Institute in Sweden to assist patients with different hematological malignancies or other late stage tumors where body cavity fluids has been produced by the patients’ tumor cells.
Patient samples like blood, bone-marrow or body cavity fluids containing tumor cells (like ascitic fluid or pleura) can be used as a starting material. Low numbers of tumor cells, only two up to four million are enough to examine thirty different medicines. The test is performed in a course of three days, under controlled cell incubation conditions.
The most difficult challenge is to keep the freshly isolated patient tumor cells alive in vitro outside of the human body. Sample taking and laboratory conditions are the major stress factors for the tumor cell. The goal is therefor to mimic the in vivo conditions, similar to how the tumor cell exist inside the body. Stressing the tumor cells causes undesired effects which weakens the cell and increases it’s mortality which would lead that in vitro/in vivo correlation would be poor.
QantaScope’s iVV assay™ includes a patented cell incubation media OmniSanguine to simulate the in vivo conditions.
HexascopeHAEMA™ automated scanner and image analyzer, together with the IVV assay™ kits, including the most important reagents to perform the drug sensitivity assay, based on cell survival on twenty cancer patients. The scanner is automatically generating a Clinical Report where the different drugs are ranked according to their tumor cell killing efficiency.
