Tumor cultures: it's like interrogating POWs without violating the Geneva convention

March 1, 2011 7:55 AM

Looking for a company which takes live cancer cells, cultures them, and drops chemo agents on the cultures to see which ones are likely to be effective in vivo.

I heard about such a company Saturday night. It's probably situated on the West Coast of the US. The chain of gossip through which I heard it is a bit tortured and is going to take a while to trace back. My Mum is dying of taxane-resistant triple-negative metastatic breast cancer tumors in her lungs, and I would like to find this company as soon as possible.

posted by Coventry to Health & Fitness (4 answers total)

This is called a chemoresponse assay or chemotherapy sensitivity and resistance assay. There are several companies that do it, among them Precision Therapeutics, AntiCancer Inc, Rational Therapeutics, and Weisenthal Cancer Group. The last three are based in California, if that helps.
posted by jedicus at 8:26 AM on March 1, 2011

There was a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker last year about drug discovery that described the use of this method at a firm called Synta Pharmaceuticals, but they were based in MA.
posted by jeb at 9:27 AM on March 1, 2011

Thanks to both of you. Jeb, just to clarify, I meant culturing the tumor cells of a specific patient, to test the sensitivity of that specific patient's tumor cells to different chemo agents. The Gladwell article was independently interesting, though.
posted by Coventry at 1:02 PM on March 1, 2011

I hope that this is in time for you, or useful to people who find this thread.
The company that you are looking for is Caris Life Sciences, and what you want is the Target Now Molecular Profile.
posted by pickypicky at 7:11 PM on November 8, 2011