Immunotherapies in pancreatic and breast cancers—two prominent and lethal cancer types—are not a home run on their own. These therapies often benefit from working in combination with other treatments, such as antibodies or drugs.
Jonathan Dordick, a chemical and biological engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and an international team of collaborators, developed a platform that can help identify which therapy combinations will most benefit a patient.
The researchers developed a chip that encourages immune cells and cancer cells to grow together in three-dimensions, recapitulating the tumor microenvironment. The platform enables rapid screening of anticancer therapies for developing personalized immunotherapies.
“This kind of high-throughput and easy-to-use cell culture and analysis platform is highly desired for characterizing complex immune responses and elucidating their underlying mechanisms in clinical settings,” Moo-Yeal Lee, a biomedical engineer at the University of North Texas, who was not involved in the research, wrote in an email.
Solid tumors ...
