Project Details
Description
Project Summary
Metastatic prostate cancer is a notoriously heterogeneous disease that is difficult to treat. The
five-year survival rate has not improved over the past twenty-five years and the median survival
rate for those diagnosed with metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) is only
15-36 months. Precision medicine has the potential to improve mCRPC outcomes.
Transciptomic sequencing of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) can provide important information
regarding metastatic disease and is an attractive alternative to serial biopsies of metastatic
lesions as biopsies are difficult for sick patients to endure and they do not always yield a viable
tumor specimen for analysis. Metastatic lesions are often established from CTC progenitors
seeding a distant site through the bloodstream or lymphatic system. Current methods for
extracting and analyzing CTCs from the bloodstream are clinically limited as they are expensive,
inefficient, and do not yield enough CTCs to capture actionable biomarkers, often only obtaining
10 CTCs per procedure. Thus, there remains a major unmet need to improve the technologies
that can identify and isolate CTCs from the bloodstream of patients with metastatic disease.
Astrin Biosciences will improve upon current CTC technologies by developing a novel
individualized medicine platform that uses apheresis to isolate CTCs. A Machine Learning
classifier built upon quantitative holograms intelligently identifies and filters large numbers of
CTCs that are viable for ex vivo drug testing. The Astrin Biosciences platform can capture and
analyze 10,000 CTCs with a single procedure, providing an opportunity for comprehensive
representation of the heterogeneity of mCRPC. This process allows for improved determination
of activated pathways that will help infer precision drug targets that can be tested on the
patient’s own cancer cells. Knowledge of the optimal course of therapy prior to systemic drug
administration will improve response to therapy at a lower cost to the system. This proposal thus
aims to do the following: 1) assess feasibility for aphaeretic extraction of large numbers of CTCs
from patients with mCRPC and 2) complete comparative profiling and ex vivo viability testing of
cultured CTCs. This platform could shift the current paradigm of metastatic prostate cancer
treatment and offer a novel approach to improve the poor 5-year survival rate of mCRPC.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 6/1/22 → 5/31/23 |
Funding
- National Cancer Institute: $399,678.00
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