Implant a tiny device that tests twenty drugs inside the patient's own tumour
A rice-grain-sized implant can release small doses of many different drugs into separate spots of a tumour, then be removed so doctors can see which one worked in that person.
Implantable microdevices developed at MIT and Brigham and Women's Hospital deliver microdoses of up to 20 agents into spatially separated tumour regions for 24-72 hours before retrieval and analysis, and first-in-human studies have been performed in breast, sarcoma and brain tumours. Applied to immune-modulating agents, the device measures local pharmacodynamics in the real human microenvironment, which no model reproduces.
- Cold tumours and the immunosuppressive microenvironment · Most tumours keep the immune system out or asleep, so immunotherapy helps only a minority.
- Too many combinations to test · There are thousands of possible drug pairs and sequences. Trials can test a few dozen a year.
- Preclinical models that do not predict people · Nine in ten cancer drugs that work in mice fail in humans. Our models are the reason.
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