RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Rapid identification of optimal drug combinations for personalized cancer therapy using microfluidics
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 093906
DO 10.1101/093906
A1 Federica Eduati
A1 Ramesh Utharala
A1 Dharanija Madhavan
A1 Ulf Peter Neumann
A1 Thorsten Cramer
A1 Julio Saez-Rodriguez
A1 Christoph A. Merten
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/12/14/093906.abstract
AB Functional screening of live patient cancer cells holds great potential for personalized medicine and allows to overcome the limited translatability of results from existing in-vitro and ex-vivo screening models. Here we present a plug-based microfluidics approach enabling the testing of drug combinations directly on cancer cells from patient biopsies. The entire procedure takes less than 48 hours after surgery and does not require ex vivo cultivation. We screened more than 1100 samples for different primary human tumors (each with 56 conditions and at least 20 replicates), and obtained highly specific sensitivity profiles. This approach allowed us to derive optimal treatment options which we further validated in two different pancreatic cancer cell lines. This workflow should pave the way for rapid determination of optimal personalized cancer therapies at assay costs of less than US$ 150 per patient.