evolutionary platform to predict breast cancer (BC) patients outcome and response to therapy

ended

“BARRICADE” is about an evolutionary platform to predict breast cancer (BC) patients outcome and response to therapy in a faster and specific manner. Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer mortality among women and is characterized by a high interindividual variability in response to cancer treatment, and often resistance to therapy arise over the time or after first line of treatment. For this reason, the therapeutic approach of each patient has to be set up during its management causing some gaps, useless toxicities and a losing of time useful for patient’s cure. In cancer research, cells are usually grown in a monolayer on dishes of polystyrene plastic to perform experiment or toxicity studies. Alternatively, researchers use animal models that are able to mimic a more physiological growth of tumor cells and they take in account also the microenvironmental influences. Unfortunately, animal models do not recapitulate the human complexity, and sometimes they do not predict tumor behaviour and clinical response. For this reason, organoids are emerging as new more complex system that may overcome the limitations of traditional cancer model. “BARRICADE” will contribute to taking BC cancer therapy to beyond state-of-art, developing personalized anticancer therapies and giving useful information for cure setting up. Indeed, progress in developing in vitro 3D organoid culture system using primary human breast cancer tissues have attracted great interest as an emerging tools for precision medicine. BARRICADE will help to overcome some of those barriers by giving preclinical information for future therapy settings.