The incidence of brain metastases continues to increase, currently affecting 25% of cancer patients. But currently available therapies have limited efficacy and fail to improve survival limited efficacy and fail to improve survival.
To address this situation, the team led by Manuel Valiente, head of the Brain Metastasis Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), has designed the METPlatform to test drugs on patients’ own biopsies to identify effective therapies for brain metastasis. Once the biopsy is received at the hospital, the cells are cultured for several days in the laboratory. The METPlatform screening platform is applied to these cultures, where the behavior of hundreds of compounds is analyzed simultaneously, also favoring the identification of new therapeutic targets.
The team’s objective is to be able to predict the patient’s response to a specific treatment, in order to improve the design of clinical trials, thus favoring personalized medicine in oncology. They propose its use in patients at high risk of developing resistance or when there are no reliable biomarker-based therapies.
