Scalable, reproducible, immune-intact tumor organoid co-culture platform

This technology is a patient-derived, immune-intact tumor organoid co-culture system designed for immunotherapy and broader oncology drug screening.

Unmet Need: Accurate ex vivo tumor models for personalized drug screening

Personalized cancer immunotherapies require ex vivo models that accurately recapitulate the patient’s tumor and immune microenvironment. However, current patient-derived organoid models are limited because they omit key tumor-resistant immune cells such as tissue-associated macrophages (TAMs) and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). These immune populations can significantly influence the response to immunotherapies, targeted agents, and combination treatments. A platform that maintains these immune components can therefore substantially improve the reliability of personalized therapeutic decision-making in oncology.

The Technology: Patient-derived, immune-intact tumor organoid co-culture system

This technology describes a patient-derived tumor organoid co-culture system that retains the tumor’s own tissue-resident immune cells (TAMs, TILs), collected directly from surgically resected tumors. This system separates the tumor cells and immune cells, allowing each to be expanded as needed, and then recombines them into a co-culture that more accurately reflects the tumor microenvironment. These co-cultured cells remain viable for up to seven days, enabling robust assessment of drug response. This platform is reproducible and scalable for larger therapeutic screenings, and is suitable for evaluating a range of immune-modulatory, targeted, and combination oncology agents.

This technology has been validated with patient tumor samples.

Applications:

• Immunotherapy drug screening (checkpoint inhibitors, immune-modulatory agents)
• Screening platform for targeted therapies, combination therapies, and precision-oncology treatments
• Research tool for the analysis of tumor growth and expansion and tumor-immune cell interactions
• Research tool for the discovery and development of cancer immunotherapies and tumor-microenvironment modulators
• Platform for studying tumor microenvironment remodeling
• System for biomarker discovery or patient-stratification assays
• Functional profiling of tumor-resident immune cells
• Preclinical screening and early-stage therapeutic validation system for biotech/biopharma
• Evaluation of resistance mechanisms to immunotherapies or targeted therapies

Advantages:

• More accurate representation of the patient tumor microenvironment
• Maintains viability of tumor and immune cells through drug screening studies
• Scalable and reproducible, enabling standard testing across many samples
• Improves the efficacy of personalized medicine drug screening
• Compatible with a range of drug classes
• Potential for future long-term culture and expansion of tumor-resident immune cells

Lead Inventor:

Joel Gabre, M.D.

Patent Information:

Patent Pending

Related Publications:

Tech Ventures Reference:

• IR CU24328

• Licensing Contact: Joan Martinez