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The 2021 Functional Precision Medicine in Blood Cancer Symposium which took place virtually on March 25-26th, 2021 was very interesting and well attended. If you were not able to make it please take a moment to watch the recording by clicking on the "Learn More" button below.

SEATTLE, April 13, 2021 -- SEngine Precision Medicine, a precision oncology company that pre-tests drugs on patient-derived live tumor specimens employing its CLIA certified PARIS® Test, today presented results from an ovarian cancer study indicating strong predictive value of the PARIS® Test (abstract number 534) at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting, taking place virtually from April 10-15, 2021.

We cordially invite you to the 2021 Functional Precision Medicine in Blood Cancer Symposium that will be hosted in the context of a European Functional Precision Medicine Initiative in cooperation with the EHA-SWG Functional Precision Hematology, and the Society for Functional Precision Medicine. The symposium will take place March 25-26th, 2021 – virtual - and will bring together global experts on high-throughput drug screening, precision medicine and blood cancer. You’ll see familiar faces from the SfPM and more!

Please click the button below to register. To preview the schedule, please click here.

Are you a computational biologist or bioinformatician eager to apply your skills and ingenuity to tackle cancer? We open two postdoc researcher positions at NTNU as part of our ERA PerMed project ONCOLOGICS. The two appointed postdocs will work in close collaboration with each other and with a large research team from leading European research organizations.

Dr Anthony Letai sits down with Dr Vinay Prasad for a an episode of Plenary Session where Dr Letai speaks about precision oncology, the Match trial and NGS in cancer. Be sure to check it out!

Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is the most common soft tissue sarcoma in childhood and adolescence. Refractory/relapsed RMS patients present a bad prognosis that combined with the lack of specific biomarkers impairs the development of new therapies. Here, we utilize dynamic BH3 profiling (DBP), a functional predictive biomarker that measures net changes in mitochondrial apoptotic signaling, to identify anti-apoptotic adaptations upon treatment. We employ this information to guide the use of BH3 mimetics to specifically inhibit BCL-2 pro-survival proteins, defeat resistance and avoid relapse.

Researchers are using patient-derived tumor organoids to match patients with optimal treatments - When most people think of precision cancer medicine, they think of genomics, with researchers trying to decipher complex gene interactions for the clinical benefit of patients. But according to Dr. Christopher Kemp, a cancer biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, that is a narrow view: “[Genomics] is important, but it’s not the whole puzzle by any stretch.”

Anthony Letai, PhD gives an overview of how BH3 profiling can be used to predict response to therapy. “There is an enormous amount of actionable information that can be obtained from taking the actual cancer cell you’re interested in and subjecting it to a relevant perturbation, that is, exposing it to the actual drugs,” he said. “We nearly completely overlook this in today’s precision medicine approaches, and I think there is enormous unrealized potential in this general approach.”

“Cancer cells that are cultured for extended periods of time can undergo a variety of changes and may not be representative of the tumor cells that are actually in a mouse or human,” says study first author Patrick Bhola, PhD, of Dana-Farber. “The challenge has been to create a drug-screening technique that shrinks the gap between tumor cells in the body and the cells we do the screening on. The technique we’ve developed helps to accomplish that.” Read Dana Farber’s press release about HT-DBP technology for more information.

Because each patient’s cancer is unique, novel approaches are needed to translate clinical and genomic diagnostics to actionable information. While the concept of directly studying a given patient’s tumor cells using functional assays is simple and appealing, the execution is not. Major challenges include technical, analytical, and regulatory, as well as inherent skepticism concerning the use of personalized models for functional testing. Benefits include the ability to functionally interrogate an actual patient’s cancer in unprecedented detail using high throughput assays. This session will present strategies to overcome major challenges and will discuss different applications of functional testing including target identification, preclinical drug and companion diagnostic development, and identification of potentially effective drugs for cancer patients in real time. Attendees will gain an appreciation of how functional testing of patient derived tumor cells can reveal novel insights into cancer biology and accelerate the goals of precision medicine.