New HTS Platform for Personalized Tumor Therapy
The Division of Personalized Tumor Therapy was founded in 2010 as a research partnership between the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the State Government of Bavaria, and the University of Regensburg with the support of the City of Regensburg. The group of researchers took their first premises at the BioPark, an enterprise of the City of Regensburg. From its beginning, the group has been organizationally affiliated with Fraunhofer ITEM in Hannover as a project group, funded by the State of Bavaria. After successful evaluation of the project group, it became a division of Fraunhofer ITEM in 2017, dedicated to its own research topic and headed by Prof. Dr. Christoph Klein, who also holds the Chair of Experimental Medicine and Therapy Research at the University of Regensburg.
The Fraunhofer ITEM Working Group on High-Throughput Drug and Target Discovery is pursuing two main goals: (i) the utilization of high-throughput screening technologies for the development of “personalized” culture conditions for the expansion of patient-derived tumor cells and (ii) high-throughput screening campaigns for the identification of therapeutic compounds and drug targets. As the success rate for the cultivation of tumor cells is relatively low, an automated high-throughput screening (HTS) platform has been established to systematically test and optimize culture and expansion conditions for primary human tumor cells on a large scale. The goal is to use such multidimensional screening strategies on a broad spectrum of tumor types and to ultimately generate a multitude of preclinical models derived from patient tumor material.
Following the successful development of a multitude of patient-derived preclinical models, the cells will be subjected to high-throughput genetic and pharmacological screens to identify disease-relevant genes, signaling pathways, therapies and diagnostic tools. Functional screening with compound libraries will furthermore enable the identification of new therapeutic lead structures in these cell models. Such approaches will be of particular significance for very aggressive tumor types, for which effective therapies are yet lacking. Fraunhofer ITEM in Regensburg has recently signed a strategic cooperation contract on this matter with Assay.Works GmbH, a company also based at the BioPark Regensburg. Within this cooperation Fraunhofer ITEM has access to the complete state-of-the-art HTS infrastructure at Assay.Works, such as pipetting robots, nanoliter dispensers, plate readers, automated high-content imaging systems as well as a comprehensive collection of small-molecule compound and siRNA libraries.
