Ex vivo model in Oncology: The Oncogramme

Despite advances in both in vitro human cell-based models and in vivo animal models, 97% of oncology drugs that enter clinical trials fail to receive regulatory approval. To overcome this poor approval rate, we need clinically patient-relevant translational systems that better mimic the heterogeneity and complexity of human tumors to:

• Understand drug effects on the tumor cells
• Gain more accurate insights beyond general cell viability
• Evaluate new drugs 
• To be able to accompany the new treatment in the clinical phase as a complementary diagnosis 

The Oncogramme ex vivo platform is a highly translatable functional assay for evaluating both monotherapy and combination of therapies in patient tumors cells in a standardized environment with proven clinical validity. 

Advancement Over Traditional Models

Challenges associated with traditional models include:

• In vitro assays, such as 2D cell lines, lack the complexity and heterogeneity of patient primary cancer cells.
• In vivo models, such as PDX, are more complex to develop and have lower throughput. 

The Oncogramme platform provides an alternative approach by keeping the complexity of the tumor (primary culture of patient cancer cells) and including a standardized production process with established clinical predictivity. 

A unique, standardized approach

In a few words, the Oncogramme® is a standardized functional assay that enables the quantitative evaluation of the anti-cancer capacities of a therapeutic molecule or combination of molecules, directly on cancer primary cells extracted from a patient's tumor.  As the results of this in vitro evaluation are more than 80% correlated with the results obtained in patients, this functional assay makes it possible to secure your results with a test that is as close as possible to the patient, upstream of the clinical phase (R&D, preclinical phase) or during clinical studies (complementary diagnosis).  A drug, or combination of rugs, identified by the Oncogramme® as having an anti-cancer effect on a patient's cancer cells will have a real effect on the patient's tumor during treatment in over 80% of cases.
The high predictivity of the Oncogramme is based on 3 proprietaries technology pillars:
1.    Multi steps standardized procedure with clinical data correlations for validation
2. Complex proprietary kit of culture media and reagents, the OncoMiD-Via® Series, for sample shipping/preparation and tumor culture of all cancer cells for an optimal analysis. OncoMiD® medium and reagents provide a chemically defined solution for the transport, separation, and culture of tumour cells. These chemically defined and validated media support the transport and dissociation of tumor samples, enabling subsequent ex vivo culture
Types of tumors treated :   Breast tumors Colon/rectum tumors Prostate tumors Glyoblastoma tumors Lung tumors Ovarian tumors
3.   Unique proprietary algorithm for automated counting correlated with clinical data.

The Oncogramme is currently validated for preclinical and clinical studies in colorectal, breast, ovarian and lung cancers, as well as glioblastoma, and is ready for development in other areas.

Example of correlation between a predicitive biomarker and tumor cell effective response : HER2 Breast tumor and Herceptin

A diagnostic version (CE-IVD) for metastatic colorectal cancer is already on the market.