The broader/commercial impact of this project aims to develop and commercialize a microfluidic device as a clinical platform to rapidly identify precise and effective therapies for individual cancer patients. Currently, prediction in precision medicine only has limited success, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) does not recommend using any specific drug sensitivity testing method alone to guide clinical treatment decision-making. Therefore, there is an urgent and unmet clinical need to create a rapidly implementable and clinically relevant experimental system that can rapidly and economically test the effects of therapeutic options on an individual patient's biopsy. The microfluidic platform developed in this project aims to rapidly and accurately evaluate drug efficacy using individual patient's biopsies, thus guiding personalized cancer treatment and leading to increased survival rates, reduced cost of healthcare, and improved quality of patient life. In addition, this technology will facilitate cancer drug discovery and development in terms of cost and time, leading to reduced costs of drug development.
This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will develop a microfluidic system that preserves viability, structure, and other biological properties of tissue biopsy samples, providing a platform for efficient drug screening and determining the responsiveness of individual patient cancer samples to therapeutic drugs. Current precision medicine for cancer treatment is mainly prediction-based on cancer genomic data instead of direct test or validation of the responsiveness of patient cancer samples to drugs. Lack of rapid and accurate methods for such direct tests is a major obstacle in cancer treatment. To overcome this obstacle, Microfluidic Tissue Arrays (µFTA) will be developed to mimic physiological blood perfusion to maintain the native microenvironment of tumor samples. As a result, tumor tissues cultured in the µFTAs can preserve their in vivo biological properties. This project will establish the feasibility of setting up a robust assay in the µFTA for measuring tumor tissue response to drugs and assess initial correlation of the obtained data with in vivo results. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a µFTA-based platform to directly evaluate the responsiveness of patient biopsy tissues to different therapies, thus providing drug selection guidance for individual patients.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
