Personal Functional Profiling

A fundamental tenet of precision oncology is that genomic and molecular tumor profiling enable identification of the most effective drugs tailored to the patient. However, predicting successful therapies on the basis of computational approaches alone may be challenging. An integrated approach consisting of genomic analysis of the patient tumor, direct measures of tumor growth in response to drugs using the patient tumor derivatives, and further validation of therapeutic efficacy of the selected drugs might be a next step toward precision oncology.
To this end, we will develop a novel standardized and centralized approach named Integral Personalized Functional Profiling in Luxembourg in collaboration with KSILINK in Strasbourg (France). Based on recent improvements in cancer biopsy-derived 3D-culture technologies the PFP process will challenge patient material with a large panel of FDA-approved drugs to generate personalized functional response profiles. PFP will be set up in Luxembourg and continuously optimized in coordination with partner clinics and centers around patients with gastrointestinal cancers (GIC) and/or Glioblastomas (GBM). It will provide clinicians with off-label treatment choices for patients where first line treatment has failed. Personalized treatment outcome for those patients will be assessed during longitudinal patient follow-up studies with well-defined clinical endpoints. PFP thus will offer a concrete procedure towards precision medicine in a closed loop diagnostic-treatment cycle. At the same time, PFP will constitute a new, integrated data set that can be used to annotate patients' genetic tumor information as well as high resolution clinical images (3T MRI). Iterative annotation cycles will render both genetic and medical imaging data themselves more predictive with respect to specific treatment choices. Altogether, the integration of genome analysis, patient cell-based drug profiling, and functional validation will foster sustainable clinical success in precision oncology.