SBIR Phase II: A Cancer Diagnostic Instrument to Measure Empirical Treatment Response

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is a novel, automated, tumor slice culture instrument that can accurately assesses individual cancer patients’ sensitivity to anti-cancer drugs. The instrument will automate a novel 3D tumor slice culture method using fresh human tumor tissues. It has been shown to accurately predict patient responses to anti-cancer drugs, in 8 days from biopsy or surgery, enabling doctors to make data-driven decisions to select the optimal treatment for each patient. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to build the first-in-class instrument that will automate an assay that measures cancer drug treatment response. To impact both clinical care and drug development pipelines, this assay needs to be performed on thousands of samples, accurately each time. Automating the assay through this project is necessary to scale the assay and meet these demands. This project will refine the Automated Tissue Slicer and Handler (ATSH) prototyped in Phase 1 of this project. The proposed objective and tasks will enable scaling of sample preparation going into the ATSH, refine and expand the ATSH design and functionality including consumables, and implement customized liquid handling applications that can be programmed for different assays, resulting in an automated system that runs the assay more consistently, eliminates key human failure modes, requires less time, and reduces cost. Success in these activities will yield a production ready, high capacity, quality-controlled instrument that accurately reports treatment responses to transform both drug development and personalized cancer care. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.