Catalyst Awardee

Project Description

Development of High Throughput 3D-Patient Cancer Culture System with Anticancer Drug Exposure Through Blood Capillary

Matsusaki Michiya, PhD; Katayama Ryohei, PhD

Competition Sponsor: Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development

“ancer is still unsolved severe disease because of the inter- and intra-tumor genetic heterogeneity. Thus, personalized cancer medicine has been strongly desired to find the best therapeutic strategy for each patient. To achieve it, in vitro expanding technology of the patient cancer cells maintaining their characteristics and genetic information is important for the anticancer drug screening.

We recently found novel technology “sedimentary culture” to develop three-dimensional (3D) cancer-stromal tissues by optimizing physicochemical factors together with biological factors such as blood capillary, The constructed 3D-cancer-stromal tissues were suitable for high-throughput in vitro culture of patient derived cancer cells (PDC) maintaining their characteristics and genetic information. However, there were still big issues about different drug exposure pathway because we could not add drugs to the cultured PDC through blood capillary. Accordingly, the exposed drug concentrations of the 3D-culture were not the same dose as the actual drug exposure to the patients. To the best of my knowledge, there are no reports of in vitro 3D-PDC culture systems to achieve the drug exposure through blood capillary to compare with patient anticancer drug history.

In this research, we propose development of high throughput 3D-PDC culture systems with anticancer drug exposure through blood capillary by combination of our “sedimentary culture” and “open-pored 3D-blood capillary formation in 3D-tissues” technologies. This research will contribute to achieve for the first time the cancer personalized medicine by precise comparison with patient anticancer drug history at same concentration.

Sign up for updates