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HEIndividual fellowship2022–2024

POC-TDM · Development of a point-of-care microfluidic device for Therapeutic Drug Monitoring in cancer treatment (POC-TDM)

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2022-09-01 → 2024-08-31
EU contribution
€157,622
Participants
1
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

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Results in brief

Development of a point-of-care microfluidic device for Therapeutic Drug Monitoring in cancer treatment (POC-TDM)

This MSC Action is titled “Development of a point-of-care microfluidic device for Therapeutic Drug Monitoring in cancer treatment (POC-TDM)”. This project is aimed to personalize and improve current cancer care through a novel microfluidic technology enabling the monitoring of chemotherapeutics concentration in the patients’ blood during therapy. As a cancer treatment, chemotherapy is prescribed in a bid to eliminate cancer cells. However, chemotherapy protocols are established as ‘one size fits all’, with no allowance for interpatient differences in drug pharmacokinetics. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project POC-TDM investigated the possibility of improving and personalising chemotherapy. For instance, missing target blood concentration will lead to drug resistance and/or unwanted side effects. As such, therapeutic drug monitoring could be the key to improve and personalise chemotherapy. In fact, the project proposes a new microfluidic chip-based approach to rapidly determine plasma concentrations of commonly used anticancer drugs. This new system could improve cancer survival rates through patient-tailored therapy. Chemotherapy is here to stay, helping millions of patients annually. Surprisingly, research focusing on the improvement of chemotherapy is sorely missing. The rise of biological and immunotherapies seemingly put chemotherapy on the bench, despite treatment of most of cancer patients still includes conventional drugs. The POC-TDM MSCA project made an attempt to lay the foundation of a new, personalized cancer treatment via TDM and give chemotherapy a long-overdue improvement.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Cancer claims almost 10 million lives annually, making it one of the major causes of death around the world. Despite the development of novel drugs and treatment options, the 5-years survival of the most common cancers are still strikingly low. Chemotherapy (CT) is a widely used option to treat malignancies, however CT protocols are established on a “one size fits all” basis and ignore inter-patient differences in drug pharmacokinetics which influence the blood levels of anticancer drugs, therefore leading to improper dosing in 50% of patients. Missing target blood concentration will lead to drug resistance and/or unwanted side effects. Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) could be the key to improve and personalize CT, however the lack of an affordable point-of-care (POC) method is preventing its introduction to oncology. Mass spectrometry (MS) is the golden standard analytical approach to determine blood drug levels, but the instrument and specialized expertise to operate it are rarely available in the clinical environment. The high volume of blood required for MS analysis is also a challenge, because cancer patients are regularly weakened. Exploiting the strong and specific fluorescence of anthracyclines, the most used CT agents, we propose a radically new microfluidic chip-based approach to rapidly determine plasma concentrations of several widely applied anticancer drugs. Microvolume plasma separation and collection from a drop of blood (>50 ul) will be done with a specifically designed chip, then plasma anthracycline concentration will be measured using a compatible spectrophotometer. The approach will be validated using clinically relevant mouse tumour models and with samples from veterinary cancer patients. This interdisciplinary project, combining microfluidic engineering with cancer research, will introduce a novel POC-TDM system which could change CT treatments and improve survival through patient-tailored therapy.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • HUN-REN ENERGIATUDOMANYI KUTATOKOZPONT · BudapestCoordinatorHungary

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union