Technology could help usher in personalised chemotherapy

The details, published in a recent publication of the journal Biomaterials, outline the work of Steven Lenhert, a Florida State biology assistant professor and principal investigator on the research effort.

‘Right now, cancer patients receive chemotherapy treatments that are based on the accumulated knowledge of what has worked best for people with similar cancers,’ said Lenhert. ‘This is the case because hospitals don’t have the technology to test thousands of different chemotherapy mixtures on the tumour cells of an individual patient. This technology could give them access to that capability, making the treatments truly personalised and much more effective.’

According to a statement, the key to Lenhert’s invention is miniaturising the first phase of a process used by pharmaceutical companies to discover new drugs.

Currently, these companies use large, specialised laboratories to test hundreds of thousands of compounds on different cell cultures in a process known as high throughput screening. The equipment and manpower cost is substantial, even though only a tiny fraction of the compounds will ever make it to the next phase of testing.