Anti-cancer drug screening enabled by Pre-templated Instant Partitions and single cell RNA sequencing

Project SummaryAbstract Tyrosine Kinase InhibitorsTKIsare molecularly targeted therapies that have dramatically improved progression free survival in non small cell lung cancerHowevereven these remarkable drugs are ultimately rendered ineffective by innate or acquired resistanceIn vitroscreening with single cell sequencing provides insight into cell cell heterogeneity and cancer associated pathway activationallowing identification of potentially viable combination therapies that can overcome resistanceHoweversingle cell sequencing approaches require specialized and costly microfluidics that limit the number of drugs that can be testedIn this projectwe will develop a transformative new drug screening technology that will overcome the barriers of current methodsthereby accelerating preclinical drug discoveryIn contrast to current methods that use microfluidics to encapsulate and barcode single cell transcriptomesour approach uses bulk self assembly facilitated by pre templated instant partitionsPIPsPIPs remove microfluidics from the processdramatically reducing costMoreoverunlike microfluidic methodsour approach integrates seamlessly with laboratory automation andwell formatsallowing hundreds of drugs to be tested simultaneouslyThe Aims of the project will be to transfer the current academic protocol to our industrial settingoptimizing it for reaction efficiency and reliabilityand to characterize the resultant Alpha kit against cancer cell lines treated with gefitiniba well characterized TKI for lung adenocarcinomas Project Narrative Most anti cancer drugs are ultimately rendered ineffective by resistanceThe objective of this proposal is to develop a new drug screening technology that will allow screening of large compound libraries to identify combination therapies that will overcome drug resistanceThis technology relies on the core innovation of our company for performing single cell genomics using a bulk self assembly process that requires no microfluidics or specialized equipment