Personalized medicine for tailor-made cancer therapies

In the example of breast cancer, technologies and workflows are to be established, which enable the collection of additional molecular patient data beyond existing genomic data. In particular, protein-analytical platforms are to be used for the analysis of relevant protein signatures in patient tumors. By bioinformatic matching with digital compound databases, predictive therapy approaches for individual patient tumors are identified. Functional ex vivo cell models are established from primary tumor tissue and are used for efficacy testing with clinically approved drugs as well as compounds predicted using bioinformatic analyses based on identified protein signatures. Of central importance in the PRIMO project are the digitisation of the collected data sets and their linking with existing clinical patient data by integrative data analysis.
With the example of acute lymphatic leukemia (ALL), the project is aimed at monitoring the success of the optimal treatment. The patient-specific monitoring of the residual cancer cell load, known as minimal residual disease (MRD monitoring) has been established. In this process, patient-specific cancer markers are analyzed quantitatively over the treatment period in order to be able to react early and specifically to reoccurring cancer cells. PRIMO addresses new approaches to improve the standardization of the MRD monitoring: through software-based test design and evaluation of the patient-specific test result as well as microfluidic automation of the analysis, a standardized workflow will be developed, which can be established in appropriate laboratories.