Taiwan’s CancerFree Bio Showcases World’s First Commercialized Personalized Cancer Profile

Taipei, Taiwan-based CancerFree Biotech has unveiled what it calls the world’s “first commercial personalized cancer cell profile” designed to shorten the drug screening process for individual patients with stage 2 or above solid tumors. The technology was showcased at US BIO 2022.

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Tumor Organoids For Drug Screening

Founded in 2018, CancerFree has developed a system that cultivates and analyzes organoids derived from circulating tumor cells in the blood. Called the Circulating Tumor Cell-Derived Organoid (CDO) culture system, it develops a personalized patient cancer profile called an “avatar” that can simulate the body’s response to drugs. 

The process involves taking 20 ml of blood from the patient. Blood samples are homogenous and considered to be more representative than local tissue samples if the tumor has distant metastases. 

“We isolate a very small number of circulating tumor cells that enter the bloodstream from in-situ (on-site) tumors and culture the cells ex vivo (outside the body) using 3D scaffolds. This increases the number of cancer cells we can work with to build a tumor avatar (tumor profile) of the patient.”, shared Dr. Lu, one of the inventors.

The 3D scaffolds mimic the bone marrow of the body to provide an environment for cancer growth and proliferation. Once the organoids are grown, physicians could conduct drug sensitivity testing before selecting the suitable drugs for treatment. The approach speeds up the drug selection process and reduces the risk of drug resistance that could complicate treatment, said the company. 

CancerFree’s system can successfully grow cancer cells in approximately 90% of the more than 100 cancer types. The technology has been tested successfully in over 900 cases, said Dr. Chin, the dean of Taiwan Medical University Hospital. 

The system can furthermore be matched to over 100 types of generic drugs, making it easier for physicians to find the appropriate drug to match the patient’s tumor profile, he added. This was achieved with software developed by CancerFree that automates drug selection. 

With the original patent for the technology from the US and Taiwan, and an exclusive license by the Taipei Medical University, CancerFree’s technology will be provided free to pediatric patients. 

With the backing of Berkeley Skydeck, a startup accelerator and incubator program, and Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), CancerFree has reached the revenue stage and is hoping to find partners in pharma to bring the technology to commercial scale.

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Joy Lin

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