Biobanking is used to create personalized living tissue models. It is a new, cutting edge technology from laboratories employed to expand, cryopreserve and recover the patient’s own tumor tissue that can be retrieved from surgery, biopsy, or circulating tumor cells. This is done in order to create a patient-specific biological drug testing program. The collection of human tissues with a variety of diseases is stored by hospitals, universities, non profit organizations and pharmaceutical companies.

The biobanking of your living tissue provides versatility of investigations through:

• Primary mouse xenografts from patient’s surgical or blood tissues
• Primary tumor organoids or stem cell cultures directly from the patient
• Surrogate primary mouse xenografts from similar patients may also contribute to research on your behalf

Of utmost importance to the ICARE I-Team cancer patient is that his/her living tissue model represents the most relevant and personalized system for discovery and testing numerous options that could be a breakthrough or life-saving therapy to be chosen and prioritized by the physician and the cancer patient. The living tissue model provides for both discovery and for immediate pre-clinical assessment of toxicity and efficacy. It may even be useful to gain preliminary information on the optimal dose, route and schedule of administration of the new agents.

The potential importance of this fresh tissue platform to patient survival cannot be overstated. This is because a new drug could go from discovery to phase I/II trials within months once the personalized biological testing systems are in place. This is a process which is sometimes referred to as “real time drug discovery” with real time implying that a new drug may have direct consequences for patients whose participation helped to make the discovery possible.

Finally these living tissue models when mature lead to a better understanding of the ICARE I-Team patient’s tumor by allowing:

Characterizations of tumorigenic and differentiative and metastatic potentiation of this particular tumor clone.

Function genetic experiments i.e. gene knockdowns and metabolic analyses that are not possible in formalin fixed tissues will define gene or protein functions (hormones, receptors, enzymes, etc.) on which this particular tumor clone depends for viability, growth or metastasis.