ISB-Developed MetaboCore Offers Precision Cancer Care Faster Than Ever

The ultimate goal of precision oncology is to provide the right cancer drug to the right patient at the right time. However, cancer is difficult to treat in part because it isn’t just one disease – every cancer is unique. Even if two people have the same type of cancer in the same organ, their tumors are different.

And other important variables make precision cancer treatment challenging. 

There is the sheer number of cancer drugs on the market. In the past four years alone, more than 250 oncology drugs have been approved, bringing the total number to more than 600.

“This is the best of times – doctors now have more options to treat patients – but it is also the worst of times because an overwhelming number of options makes treatment decisions incredibly complex,” said ISB Associate Professor Dr. Wei Wei during an ISB Research Roundtable presentation.

In metastatic colorectal cancer patients, for example, there are two first-line chemotherapy options, each with roughly a 50 percent response rate. This means half of patients won’t respond to one of the drugs. Oncologists “are rolling the dice,” Wei said. And if the tumor doesn’t respond within three to six months, patients are switched to the other drug. “This trial-and-error approach means many patients have to endure unnecessary toxicity, costs, and delay in seeing an effective treatment.”

There are also limitations in how tumor specimens are studied. Currently, tumor samples are taken from patients via needle biopsy. However, the amount of material is tiny, and traditional methods of augmenting the tumor material compromise the original tumor microenvironment, which is vital for a genuine drug response evaluation. 

“This is why so many drugs that give us hope in animal studies lead to heartbreak when they fail in human trials. Without the original tumor microenvironment, we lose the context that makes the drug response real,” Wei said.

Enter MetaboCore

Wei and his colleagues have developed a promising new companion diagnostic tool called MetaboCore to help physicians quickly select the most effective systemic therapy for each cancer patient. 

MetaboCore uses microdissection to cut biopsied tumor samples into small pieces called discoids. Wei can generate hundreds of discoids – each about the size of a grain of sugar – from one diagnostic needle core.

Importantly, the discoids maintain an intact local tumor microenvironment during drug treatment allowing researchers to capture the most authentic drug response profile of each patient tumor.

You can learn more about MetaboCore by watching Wei’s presentation here or playing the video at the top of this page. 

About Research Roundtable

ISB hosts several Research Roundtable conversations each year featuring our leading scientists discussing their latest research. 

These free virtual events are designed for a general audience and provide an environment to ask questions directly to our ISB researchers.

Past Research Roundtable topics include the human gut microbiome, breakthroughs in cancer immunotherapy, complex bacterial communities, long COVID, COVID’s impact on pregnancy, Alzheimer’s disease, finding drugs to treat tuberculosis, and more. You can explore all past Research Roundtable talks and our other events here.