Even among patients with the same diagnosis, cancers can be different from person to person and can respond very differently to the recommended chemotherapy. Yet treatment decisions are still based on what works for the average patient with, for example, pancreatic cancer, not what works for this patient with this particular pancreatic cancer.
Each year in Saskatchewan, hundreds of patients with cancer and their treatment teams face this challenge.
To make treatment selection for individual patients more reliable, OncoForma, in collaboration with researchers and clinicians at the College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, is now developing a new strategy. Samples of a patient’s tumour will be grown in the lab into tiny test organs (“organoids”) and divided into over 1,000 individual test chambers. each containing a different currently available drug. By observing which drugs kill the cancer organoids, doctors can identify treatments more likely to work in that patient. OncoForma’s innovative approach may offer patients a higher probability of treatment success by ensuring that the chemotherapy is matched to their unique cancer, not the average cancer.
