Personalised medicine and pharmacogenomics

Patient-Derived Orthotopic Xenograft (PDOX) models of malignant gliomas have a unique value as clinically relevant drug testing platform, and, because of their complexity, are rarely available in the academic or industry sector. We regularly perform in vivo (mice) and ex vivo (patient-derived tumor organoids) preclinical drug efficacy studies, including precision medicine strategies, in collaboration with academia, international biotech and pharma partners.
Using our patient-derived tumor organoids (PDOs), we have established personalized functional profiling, which enables drug screening in 3D culture conditions, better recapitulating micro-environmental conditions and cell-cell interactions of the tumor tissue. Standardized PDOs permit high-throughput assessment of drug responses, which can be further validated in vivo. We currently further expand our screening models to incorporate human immune system components i.e., human organoid-immune co-culture system and PDOXs in humanized mouse models.

This project is supported by the Luxembourg Institute of Health and the Télévie Belgium Luxembourg (7.4632.17, 7.4615.18, 7.8513.18 )
Private partner funding: DelMar Pharmaceuticals, UCB Biopharma, IPSEN Innovations

Key publications

Abdul Rahim et al., Br J Cancer, 2017 pubmed
Sanzey et al., Plos One, 2015 pubmed
Fack et al., Acta N, 2015 pubmed
Keunen et al., PNAS, 2011 pubmed