MIMETAS US, INC — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: NCI

Description

African American men have the highest incidence of prostate cancer PCa are more than twice as likely to die than Caucasian men in the US Underlying factors that cause this disparity have yet to be confirmed in functional studies as representative in vitro models are not readily available to the research community This problem has two origins First a diverse source of PCa tumor cells from representative racial and ethnic backgrounds does not currently exist Second the inaccuracy of two dimensional D cancer drug screening models in predicting in vivo tumor responses in patients is a major hurdle for effective candidate drug selection and contributes to the high rate of cancer drug clinical failures This compounds the difficulty of assessing potentially subtle biological factors that may contribute to cancer health disparities CHD In this proposal Mimetas and its collaborators at Rice University will develop and demonstrate the feasibility of a racially diverse population of PDX derived PCa cultures of Caucasian Hispanic and African Americanorigin in Mimetas D OncoPlate high throughput platform containing ex vivo micro tumors Our platform will mimic the D tumor microenvironment by integrating co cultured stromal cells extracellular matrix ECM and continuous perfusion to will better predict patient responses and support CHD research We will perform a drug screen of relevant therapeutics to display the reproducibility and predictive ability of our platform In a potential Phase II we will expand the number of culture models to a fully racially diverse set and develop outputs for metastatic and angiogenesis potential