Baltimore-based company Champions Biotechnology has a business tale to tell, one reminiscent of Robin Hood. But there’s no robbing of the rich in this story. Rather, Champions uses revenue from premium services offered to wealthy clients to subsidize risky—and hard-to-fund—research.
The subsidized science, a twist on standard xenografts, is based on an old concept dating back to the 1970s. Instead of permanent cancer cell lines, scientists transfer fragments of primary tumor tissue directly into mice, creating what David Sidransky, Champions’ chairman and director of head and neck cancer research at Johns Hopkins, calls “tumorgrafts.”
Tumorgrafts are tedious work and expensive; human tumors need to be freshly implanted and often don’t grow in mice. Funds for clinical trials involving tumorgrafts haven’t been easy to come by either, due to skepticism that such predictive assays will actually work.
Sidransky prefers this model of human cancer, however, because cancer cells grown on plastic ...
