How can we eliminate cancer? By improving patient outcomes.
TumorGenesis technology is based on finding the right media, matrix and biomarkers that retain the cancer cells biological profiles. The already developed media can be combined with existing 3D cell culture platforms to provide a more reliable, reproducible, and closer in DNA/RNA and proteomic signatures of the patient-derived cancer sample. This is especially important to ovarian cancer (OVC) patients.
Patient Derived Cell Lines (PDCL)
The patient-derived cell lines (PDCL) have great promise to serve as better models for developing novel therapies and personalized oncology strategies. Unfortunately, standard cancer cell lines (SCCL) are difficult to establish and are limited in number; it is illustrative that during the 65 years since the first human cancer cell line HeLa, only ~50 to 100 ovarian and breast cancer lines have been established.
Fast facts:
- We have found that most cancer research has been carried out using only a handful of cell lines that have been in culture for decades. Over ~90% of the published cell line research in breast and ovarian cancer has been carried out using 10 cell lines (5 breast, 5 ovary). Many of standard cell lines have lost the relevant lineage markers for breast or ovarian tissue. These cell lines have lost both the histopathology and molecular profile. The loss of the profile results in xenograft tumors frequently differ from the primary tumors.
- We also discovered that SCCL generally lack the intra-tumoral heterogeneity due to clonal selection in vitro. In most cases the histopathological diagnosis of the original tumor from which the SCCL was established is unknown. For example, 12 of the 26 ovarian cancer cell lines available from ATCC/ECACC have no histological subtype information.
- Confounding this problem, many of the SCCL were established decades ago and thus the original tissue is not available for comparison. The result is that there are no matched normal cell lines associated with most SCCL lines. Because of this disconnect, it is impossible to carry out normal vs. cancer differential screens with the existing standard cell line collections.
Standard cell lines vs. TumorGenesis cell lines
Standard cell lines and media:
At TumorGenesis, we have a solution.
TumorGenesis medias can be used to culture difficult ovarian cancer cell lines from patients. TumorGenesis medias will retain 95%+ of the original cancer sample signatures even after multiple expansions (up to 70 cycles of expansion compared to 20 using other media). TumorGenesis also has access to 98 different ovarian cancer cell lines. We have unique signatures and respond differently to treatment.
Our new Living Ovarian Cancer Cell bank uses our media and retains not only the signatures of the cancer cells as they replicate, it also retains the histological forms of the tumors.
TumorGenesis’s OCI cell lines retain a larger portion of the patient samples, and not just in the in vitro cell culture, but also when the tumor samples are placed inside an animal. They histologically and biologically retain their patient-driven cancer profiles.
TumorGenesis media and cell lines:
Regular Media TumorGenesis Media
Primary culture success Less Than 1% Over 95% (36/37)
Histotype Mostly Unknown All Subtypes
Xenograft phenotypes Undifferentiated Similar to Patients
Genotype Discordant Similar to Patients
mRNA profile Discordant Similar to Patients
Correlates with Better Survival Poor Outcome
Drug response Sensitive Resistant
Number available Total 49 46 (2015)
