A Pre‐clinical Syngeneic Tumor Model for the Evaluation of Immunotherapy Biomarkers 

Description

The natural co-evolution of the immune system and tumor microenvironment of companion dogs (canines) supports the development of new immunotherapy strategies. We previously demonstrated a technology that can extract human circulating tumor cells (CTC) from liquid (blood) biopsies. The recovery of CTCs could improve disease detection and facilitate characterization of disease heterogeneity. Frequency of CTCs also correlated to patient survival outcome.Here, we propose to develop an integrated One-for-All (OfA) microfluidic platform for the simultaneous retrieval and in situ profiling of single CTCs from liquid biopsies of canines with cancer under immunotherapy. Biomarker profiles will be correlated with those from human cancer patients. Characterization include 1) morphology, 2) biomarker expression and 3) drug response. Overall, pre-clinical syngeneic tumor models for the real-time evaluation of immunotherapy will be a powerful complementary tool to generate fundamental research relevant to human clinical trials and provide key information the new drug strategy approval.