Crown Bioscience has launched a new tumor organoid drug development platform with the potential to significantly improve the predictivity and speed of preclinical drug discovery.
Independently founded in 2006, Crown Bioscience, now a JSR Life Sciences company, a business unit of JSR Corporation, is a global drug discovery and development service company with facilities in the United States, United Kingdom, China, and Taiwan, providing translational platforms to advance oncology, inflammation, and metabolic disease research. With an extensive portfolio of relevant models and predictive tools, Crown Bioscience enables clients to deliver superior clinical candidates.
Hubrecht Organoid Technology (HUB) is an organization founded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and the University Medical Center Utrecht. HUB exploits the pioneering work of Prof. Hans Clevers, who discovered methods to grow stem cell-derived human ‘mini-organs’ (HUB Organoids) from tissues of patients with various diseases. The organoids, which are part of the HUB biobanks, are characterized by genome sequencing, expression profiling and sensitivity to known and experimental drugs to establish a database linking genetic and transcriptional information to drug responsiveness. HUB offers licenses to its patented HUB Organoid Technology and access to organoids from the HUB biobank for preclinical drug screening, discovery, development and validation. In addition, HUB is performing clinical studies to validate the technology’s use as a companion diagnostic.
HUB Organoids are already a proven preclinical oncology tool providing consistent and stable growth through passages and superior quality assay readouts compared to standard 2D and 3D systems. Organoid biobanks can also be established without losing original identity for follow on or repeat studies.
The initial phase of the platform launch features the first commercially available 3D in vitro patient-derived xenograft organoid (PDXO) models generated from CrownBio’s uniquely-characterized library of 2500+ PDX models.
PDXOs are biologically equivalent to highly predictive in vivo PDX models, both being cancer stem cell driven disease models. PDXOs bring the added benefits of speed and scalability inherent to in vitro systems which are ideal for high-throughput, large-scale screens and simultaneous testing of multiple combination strategies.
Further benefits of patient-relevant PDXO models include preserving the genomic, morphological, and pathophysiological identity of their parental PDX tumors. PDXO and PDX also display similar pharmacology profiles.
These 3D in vitro models have been developed using best-in-class HUB protocols, originating from the Clevers lab, guaranteeing robustness and proven translatability. CrownBio has an exclusive license from HUB to provide preclinical oncology drug development and validation services using HUB’s Organoid Technology.
The initial launch of PDXO models includes more than 10 cancer types. Phase 2 of the platform will see HUB patient-derived organoids (PDO) available exclusively from CrownBio in Q1 2020.
“At CrownBio, we’ve pioneered the development of patient-derived models.” … “Our new library of well-characterized and annotated organoids with matched in vivo PDX models offers an unprecedented translational workflow for preclinical drug discovery. For the first time, a truly seamless transition from in vitro to in vivo is possible. Through our model annotation, there’s also the opportunity for automated biomarker discovery to improve our ability to predict patient response.” – Henry Li, PhD, chief scientific officer at Crown Bioscience
“We are delighted to see HUB Organoid technology being successfully applied to the development of PDX-derived organoids and being made available to the broader industry by CrownBio.” … “This pioneering system provides access to an expanded library of patient-derived in vitro and in vivo models effectively bringing a wider cancer patient population into the lab.” – Rob Vries, PhD, CEO at HUB
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