Publication of Article in Cancer Supports Use of Personalized Mouse Avatars to Predict Treatment Benefit in Patients

HACKENSACK, N.J., April 8, 2014

In the study, 16 patients with heavily pre-treated advanced sarcoma had their tumors successfully engrafted into mice as avatars to test different drug treatments. Thirteen of the 16 patients commenced treatment with the avatar-directed therapy and all showed a correlation between the results of their mice and their clinical outcome. Mouse avatar drug sensitivity data was used more than once for three patients to accurately predict responses to several lines of therapy without requiring fresh tissue grafting.

"When treating patients with advanced disease, we frequently have a number of treatment options at our disposal but no predictive methods for determining which one will have the best outcome for the individual patient," said Justin Stebbing, M.D., Professor of Cancer Medicine and Oncology of Imperial College London and principal investigator of the study. "In this study, the technology has shown the potential to provide a predictive approach to finding the right treatment for the individual patient."

David Sidransky, M.D., Director of Head and Neck Cancer Research at Johns Hopkins University and Chairman of Champions Oncology added, "It has been a long-time goal of the oncology community to develop therapeutics and treatment protocols that can be tailored to individual patients for the best outcomes. These data support the promise of using TumorGrafts to accurately predict drug response in clinical settings. We will continue to investigate the technology in clinical applications, while also expanding our TumorBank that can provide vast amounts of data to drug researchers."

Champions TumorGraft is a personalized approach used to guide physician treatment decisions for cancer patients. A piece of the patient's living tumor is removed during surgery or biopsy and implanted in immune-deficient mice. After the TumorGraft grows, still closely resembling the patient's tumor, Champions Oncology tests drug treatments in the TumorGraft and measures the response. Champions' TumorGraft experience has demonstrated high rates of predictability using multiple therapies, including single-agent and combination cytotoxic regimens, targeted biologics as well as drugs that control the microenvironment.

Every TumorGraft is preserved as a living sample for future patient use. These banked TumorGrafts can be re-grown and tested in the event of cancer progression or recurrence. They have been successfully utilized in most solid tumor types including colorectal, ovarian, lung, breast, sarcoma, pancreatic, stomach, esophageal and others.

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