Developing a validated Cancer-on-Chip prototype for personalized medicine

Project summary

Cancer is a very heterogeneous disease: many different types of tumors exist and even not all tumor cells in one tumor are the same. This is a big problem for clinical decision making. How should we treat each individual tumor and how exactly does the tumor react to such a treatment? These questions are difficult to address when the tumor is still inside the body, but could be answered more readily if we can grow the tissue outside the body, where we can image the tissue using microscopic techniques. Therefore, we aim to develop the technology to make this possible. The project brings together (medical) biologists, engineers and the company Genmab, who will work together on creating a working and validated ‘cancer-on-chip’ prototype that can be used in future projects for personalized medicine, as well as for asking fundamental questions about cancer biology. The project is unique in bringing together these expertises and it is high risk, because it is difficult to predict what the optimal technological set up will be. However, the options for further research will be enormous if the project teams succeed in its endeavor.

Type the project impact here.