In a major leap toward more effective cancer treatments, researchers at the University of Oulu have developed an innovative pipeline designed to directly analyze drug responses in primary patient tumor samples. This method addresses a crucial gap in cancer treatment —the difficulty in identifying the right drug, or combination of drugs, for each patient. The new discovery represents a huge step towards personalized medicine, as it enables the analysis of how individual cancers behave in response to different therapies.
The pipeline, which utilizes live-cell barcoding, enables the simultaneous screening of 96 drug treatments at single-cell resolution . The study was focused on high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC), and the pipeline revealed the complex transcriptional landscape of tumors treated with 45 different drugs, representing 13 distinct classes of mechanism of action. By integrating advanced single-cell RNA-sequencing, researchers can now map the gene regulatory dynamics driving cancer drug resistance and sensitivity in real time, directly from a patient's tumor .
The work is published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology . Experimental approaches using traditional cell line models often oversimplify the biology of real tumors, making it challenging to predict how a patient will respond to therapy. Working with primary patient samples not only improves the accuracy of these predictions but also opens the door to building a large-scale, data-driven "omics" databa.