One of the biggest challenges in oncology is the difficulty in predicting a patient’s response to therapeutics. Two patients who are incredibly similar in age, genetic makeup, diet, and lifestyle may also have the same type of cancer and respond drastically differently to treatment. Genomic precision medicine currently dominates oncology’s response to this problem. However it fails to account for pathologies driven by non-genetic factors. Recent data shows that only about one in three patients have targetable genetic alterations. There’s a clear need for a precision medicine approach that can tailor therapies to each individual patient. Lionheart Biotechnology believes that our lab-on-a-chip platform has the potential to enable truly personalized oncology.
Hundreds of experiments on a Single Slide
Functional precision medicine is an approach in which samples of live tumor cells from patients are directly perturbed with drugs to provide information which can be used to guide treatment. Limitless Oncology is Lionheart’s patented lab-on-a-chip platform which allows hundreds of different chemical compounds to be printed on a microscope slide and taken up biological cells cultured over the array to analyze cellular response. Lionheart is applying this technology to deliver thousands of combinations of anti-cancer drugs and natural compounds to a small sample of a patient’s primary cells. By using Limitless Oncology, the best possible treatment can be discovered for each patient. Limitless Oncology represents a groundbreaking advancement in functional precision medicine.
Key Advantages of functional precision cancer medicine
Limitless Oncology offers a massive advantage over parallel functional precision medicine approaches in three key areas: speed, sample size, and cell type. Limitless Oncology thousands of anti-cancer drugs to be tested on just a minute sample of a patient’s cancer cells, enabling minimally invasive sample collection procedures to be used. Furthermore, because only a small tissue sample is required, testing can be carried out on primary cells. Many parallel functional precision oncology platforms utilize 3D cell cultures and organoids, which require cells to be grown in a lab setting for weeks if not months, which can lead to changes in their behavior and response to drugs in vitro. As a result, primary cells are generally considered to be more accurate when it comes to predicting a patient’s response to treatment. Other functional precision medicine platforms that utilize primary cells are only capable of testing a handful of compounds on a sample, while Limitless Oncology can test hundreds on a single microscope slide. Lastly, because testing can be done directly on primary cells in our miniaturized assays, the precision medicine process may take as little as one week to produce results using Limitless Oncology, a drastic improvement over other platforms.
Take Action
Lionheart is currently seeking academic and industry partners to advance the capabilities of Limitless Oncology for functional precision medicine. For business development and investor relations inquiries, or to learn more about Lionheart, please schedule a call with our team or email us at contact@lionheartbio.com