CurieCoreTech In vivo preclinical experiments

Cancer treatment is continuously evolving with many potential medications being developed. However, clinical trials are costly, time-consuming, and expose patients to side effects. Without prior preclinical evaluation, the ethics, feasibility, and economics of conducting them would be questionable. Preclinical investigation of anti-tumor compounds on tumor models is an important step in the process of drug development. To obtain preclinical results with high predictive value for clinical trials, the choice of the preclinical tumor model(s) is a crucial point.

Human primary xenografts, directly obtained from patients (“Patient-Derived Xenograft” or PDX), constitute the main category of preclinical cancer models. They reproduce well the high heterogeneity of human cancers, procedures for assessment of therapeutic efficacy are well standardized for composants used in monotherapies or in combination with standard treatment. The possibilities of ex vivo genetic or therapeutic manipulations before xenotransplantation are also important.

The research performed at the Laboratory of Preclinical Investigation is an important complement to the pharmaceutical development performed by pharmaceutical companies.

Platform expertise

1. Conservation and upkeep of previously established PDXs (breast, lung, ovarian, and prostate cancers; chordoma; uveal melanoma),
2. Development of new PDXs (models from chemotherapies- and or targeted therapies-resistant patients; acquired chemotherapies- and or targeted therapies-resistant models; new tumor types, i.e. sarcomas),
3. Standard in vivo pharmacology experiments including study design, toxicity, efficacy, PK/PD experiments, tissues collections, and statistical analyses,
4. Single mouse trials,
5. Ex-vivo drug testing in PDX derived 3D cell culture,
6. Biomarker discovery using large set of PDXs.

Technologies and associated platforms

1. NGS and RNAseq technologies (bulk and single cell): NGS platform,
2. Affymetrix and CGH,
3. RT-PCR,
4. Histological and immunohistochemistry analyses,
5. Pharmacology,
6. Bioinformatics analyses.

Contact

All requests and proposals are open for discussion and optimization in order to reach requested objectives and raised issues:

• Didier Decaudin, MD, PhD, Head of the Laboratory of preclinical investigation
• Elisabetta Marangoni, PhD