Bioluminescent 3D Tumors with Immune Cell Co-culture for High Throughput Screening (HTS)

In the past decade, cancer immunotherapy has revolutionized treatment outcomes for patients with varied indications and thus offers an attractive option for drug discovery and development. Immunotherapies work by re-educating and boosting patient's immune systems to recognize and eliminate cancer cells. There is a growing need to recreate a relevant tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) that is easily traceable to quickly delineate the effect of fine-tuning the different compartments.

Recent advances in the Champions TumorGraft3D (CTG3D) platform have not only generated robust models for preclinical drug evaluation but also elevated the translational relevance by efficiently mimicking the interactions between cancer organoids and immunocytes. Currently, available analytic approaches for coculture models are limited and are highly reliant on flow cytometry and high-resolution confocal imaging endpoints. These are often slow, cost-inefficient, and cloud computing heavy thereby limiting the bandwidth of studies and decision-making.

Easily traceable tags (e.g. bioluminescent and fluorescent) are attractive options that can aid the establishment of reliable effector (E) cells to the tumors (T) cell conditions, thus enabling the user to test multiple test agents cost-effectively and rapidly. At Champions Oncology, we have generated a reliable and stable Luc and GFP-taggedCTG3D-immune co-culture platform across various tumor indications (including colon, prostate, gastric, non-small cell lung cancer, and leukemia) with autologous TILs, allogenic TILs, and expanded NK cells.