The DRP is a platform developed in Zurich in collaboration with leading paediatric oncology centres in Europe and beyond and is a personalized oncology medicine platform for VHR-L patients to screen susceptibility to treatment. This allows informed decisions for experimental treatments by testing 200+ candidate drugs on patient cancer cells. Since its development, the DRP has grown significantly over the last years, now reaching over 100 patients a year. We aim to scale the current platform across major pediatric centers, embedding the DRP as standard-of-care.
Patient cells dispatched in viably frozen aliquots are maintained in co-cultures on bone marrow stroma, exposed in high-throughput to selected drug libraries for 72 hours and analyzed by automated imaging. A cloud-based pipeline leveraging artificial intelligence enables to score drugs (single agent and combinations) and to report prioritised hits.
We and others (Frismantas 2017 28122742, Tyner 2018 PMID 30333627, Kornauth 2022 PMID 34635570, Malani D 2022 PMID: 34789538) have shown that it is possible to identify actionable drugs that exploit patient-specific vulnerabilities with a benefit for r/r leukemia patients. In a pilot phase since 2017 we could test close to hundred r/r ALL patients in real time with a turn-around of less than 4 weeks and bridge patients to SCT or CAR-T cell therapy by repurposing agents of different classes (BH3 mimetics, proteasome inhibitors, TKIs, XPO1 inhibitors, etc.; manuscript in preparation) with multiple examples of clinical activity. Molecular precision programs are being developed in several partner countries.
A cloud-based solution is already established to provide access to DRP to all partners (segmented real time access possible- each partner can use their own patient data). This DRP cloud leverages a headless analytical pipeline and the agility of a customised database for precision oncology.
Number of patients screened with the DRP (Zurich only; not accounting for patients screened in UK or Calcutta); Status as per March 2023