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Sanford M. Simon and his group tested over 5,000 compounds, either already approved for other clinical uses or in clinical trials, to see whether any of the compounds could be repurposed to treat fibrolamellar. The team used PDX models to uncover a few classes of therapeutics that eliminate fibrolamellar tumor cells grown in mice.

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.”

“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.

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.”