One of the greatest challenges in drug development is ensuring that the safety and efficacy results from early stages (i.e. from tests on cultured cells or animal models) translate well to administrating the drugs to humans. The gap between the results from these preclinical and clinical stages is clear, which calls for innovative methods better suited to modeling human physiology.

Human stem cells cultured in 3D offer an attractive solution. These cells self organize and are able to recapitulate critical features of human organs or tissues.

Glioblastoma modeling by MiniBrain^TM

70% of all brain cancers are caused by glioblastomas. These are highly aggressive and metastatic brain tumors. Only 3-10% of glioblastoma patients survive within the 5 years after they are diagnosed. Treatments including radiothearapy, surgery, and chemotherapy are currently not able to cure patients.

By developing drugs highly specific to the disease conditions and subsets of patient profiles (i.e. carrying different sets of mutations), current research strives to advance these treatments. MiniBrain platform developed by Neurix and offered as a service by InnoSer effectively supports this process.

MiniBrain cell composition and characteristics mimic those of human cortical tissue’s. When a glioblastoma sample directly collected from a patient is inoculated on MiniBrain, we are simply able to regenerate the actual conditions of the tumor in a cell culture dish. This allows us to watch closely and record all aspects relevant to the tumor growth, including tumor-neural tissue interactions and tumor invasion capacity.

Testing compounds on the platform then aims to identify the ones that prevent the growth of the tumor, while leaving healthy neural cells unharmed. Because 2D cell cultures lack the tumor-neural tissue interactions, they are not always able to produce the results obtained by the MiniBrain platform. Also, because the tumor originates from a patient, utilizing this platform paves the way to personalized medicine.

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